Tag Archives: urban garden

A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture

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In a world where the sun plays a significant role in shaping preferences for living spaces, a unique product has emerged to bridge the gap between lifestyle and the desire for a sun-soaked environment. The innovative SPOT, a pet plant inspired by the beloved Toy Story, brings a touch of whimsy and practicality to the lives of those who are away from home during the day.

Designer: Dami Seo

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Koreans have a cultural inclination towards south-facing directions for their homes, favoring abundant sunlight throughout the day. However, modern lifestyles often lead people away from home during peak daylight hours, creating a paradox between their preference for sunlit spaces and their absence during the sunniest times.

Drawing inspiration from Toy Story, SPOT takes on a personality of its own when the owner is away. Just like Woody and his adventures, SPOT enjoys the warm sunlight in the south-facing direction, making the most of the daylight hours that the owner might miss.

The creators of SPOT have ingeniously crafted its form based on Woody’s rhythmic hat line, adding an extra layer of charm and nostalgia for fans of the iconic movie series. This attention to detail enhances the emotional connection users may feel with their sun-loving companion.

SPOT’s design mimics a sunflower’s ability to move towards the sun. Equipped with sensors, SPOT can adjust its position to capture the optimal amount of sunlight, ensuring that users can enjoy the warmth without the need to move the plant manually. This dynamic feature aligns with the varying sunlight patterns throughout the day.

For users returning home, SPOT adds an element of surprise and delight. By detecting the SPOT’s location, users can playfully interact with their sun-loving companion, creating a unique and entertaining experience. The wheels at the bottom of the product enable SPOT to move towards the sunlight source, making it a dynamic and engaging addition to any home.

SPOT’s ability to move is not only entertaining but also practical. Equipped with sensors on both sides, SPOT can navigate around objects in the house, ensuring a seamless and safe journey towards the sunlight. The autonomy of movement enhances user convenience, aligning with the modern desire for smart and responsive home devices.

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To keep SPOT energized and ready for its sun-seeking adventures, a user-friendly charging unit is provided. SPOT can effortlessly navigate to the charging station, making the recharging process a hassle-free experience. Additionally, SPOT’s easy-to-clean and disassemble design ensures that maintenance is a breeze.

SPOT not only adds a touch of magic inspired by Toy Story to your home but also addresses the practical challenge of aligning sunlight preferences with a dynamic lifestyle. With its adaptability, autonomy, and entertaining features, SPOT is more than just a pet plant; it’s a delightful companion that brings joy and sunshine into the lives of its users.

The post A Plant Companion That Moves With The Sun Fitting Perfectly Into The Korean Culture first appeared on Yanko Design.

This sustainable forest complex absorbs CO2 and produces oxygen to mitigate the effects of urbanization!

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Easyhome Huanggang Vertical Forest City Complex, comprised of five sustainable green towers, was built to mitigate the effects of urbanization and fight for the environmental survival of our cities.

As our cities become increasingly popular destinations for younger generations, the need to introduce sustainable and biophilic architecture has never felt more urgent. As we face urban expansion and densification, architects are taking initiative to ensure the environmental survival of our contemporary cities. Italian architect Stefano Boeri has found promise in vertical city forest complexes, a form of biophilic architecture that incorporates teeming greenery into the very structure of residential buildings. Easyhome Huanggang Vertical Forest City Complex is Boeri’s latest sustainable undertaking, a forest complex in Huanggang, Hubei, China “intended to create a completely innovative green space for the city.”

Bounded by three streets, Easyhome covers 4.54 hectares and comprises five towers, each of which connects with an open, public space. 404 different trees fill out the layout of Easyhome, absorbing 22 tons of carbon dioxide and producing 11 tons of oxygen over the span of a year. Helping to mitigate smog and produce oxygen, the trees incorporated into Easyhome also increase biodiversity by attracting new bird and insect species. 4,620 shrubs and 2,408 square meters of grass, flowers, and climbing plants are also spread throughout Easyhome’s structure in addition to the complex’s tree species.

Easyhome’s rhythmic, modular facade also lends itself to increased biodiversity by mimicking the incongruent, wild look of nature. Rising 80 meters in height, two of the five towers are residential buildings, while the other towers remain in use as hotels and large commercial spaces. As Boeri is no stranger to vertical green complexes, he has worked on many urban forestry projects. Everywhere, from Milan to Cairo, Boeri has designed forest complexes to help mitigate the harmful effects of urbanization. However, Easyhome is a new type of vertical forest.

Describing the building’s difference in his own words, Boeri writes, “the floors have cantilevered elements that interrupt the regularity of the building and create a continuous ever-changing movement, accentuated by the presence of trees and shrubs selected from local species.” In addition to the building’s undulating facades and rugged appeal, Easyhome implements a combination of open-air balconies and closed-off terraces to blue the transitional boundary between nature and human-centered environments. This incongruent configuartion of the building’s exterior also allows the greenery to grow freely in height and foliage, the way it would in natural forests.

Designer: Stefano Boeri Architetti

The post This sustainable forest complex absorbs CO2 and produces oxygen to mitigate the effects of urbanization! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This botanical garden’s petal-inspired, hexagonal-laced glass roof brings biodiversity to the city!

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Botanical gardens in big cities always seem to help take us out of the monotonous droll of city living, weaving us through walks of native plant life and educational tours that teach us about plant cultivation and preservation. Bringing a touch of green to Magok, South Korea, Seoul Botanic Garden was designed and built to create an educational and public space that harbors flora and cultural insight from twelve tropic and Mediterranean cities across the globe.

Positioned on the southwestern side of the Han River in the Magok neighborhood of Seoul, the new botanic garden’s location was chosen partly due to the region’s pastoral history. Blossoming a safe distance away from the surrounding marshlands, Seoul Botanic Garden’s rippled, concave roof emulates the formation of a flower’s petals, particularly mimicking the shape of a Rose of Sharon’s petal bed. The 100-m wide concave dish acts as the structure’s roof, shelters the park’s guests, and by resembling the structure of a plant’s petal bed, offers a visually enhanced experience alongside the blooming plant life indoors.

Typically, the roof of a greenhouse takes the form of a convex dome, the roof’s pitch being the highest point inside the structure. However, the delicate rim of Seoul Botanic Garden’s hexagon-laced glass roof remains higher than its indented central point. Inside the greenhouse, plant life from 12 major cities across the globe, including Athens, Greece, and São Paulo, Brazil burst from every sunspot inside the disc-shaped indoor garden. Celebrated as South Korea’s first botanic park built inside a city, Seoul Botanic Garden traverses 500,000 square meters of land, comprising a greenhouse, forest, lake, and wetland.

Designer: Samoo Architects & Engineers

Garbed with a concave roof that mimics a flower’s petal bed, Seoul Botanic Garden uses the roof’s resemblance with nature to evoke a 3D experience for the garden’s guests.

A diamond-dotted skirt wraps the sides of Seoul Botanic Garden to reference the traditional facades found on greenhouses.

Inside, plant life busts at the greenhouse’s seams, covering flora from twelve major cities across the globe, primarily taken from tropical and Mediterranean climates.

Pools of water punctuate the floors of Seoul Botanic Garden, expanding the center’s overall biodiversity.

Inside, sinuous interior design harkens back to the structure of plants.

From an aerial perspective, Seoul Botanic Garden holds an impressive, closed roof that echos the shape of hibiscus flowers native to the country.

This vertical farming system was designed to build up community and accommodate the urban lifestyle!

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Urban farming takes different shapes in different cities. Some cities can accommodate thriving backyard gardens for produce, some take to hydroponics for growing plants, and then some might keep their gardens on rooftops. In Malmö, small-scale farming initiatives are growing in size and Jacob Alm Andersson has designed his own vertical farming system called Nivå, directly inspired by his community and the local narratives of Malmö’s urban farmers.

Through interviews, Andersson learned that most farmers in Malmö began farming after feeling inspired by their neighbors, who also grew their own produce. Noticing the cyclical nature of community farming, Andersson set out to create a more focused space where that cyclical inspiration could flourish and where younger generations could learn about city farming along with the importance of sustainability.

Speaking more to this, Andersson notes, “People need to feel able and motivated to grow food. A communal solution where neighbors can share ideas, inspire and help one another is one way to introduce spaces that will create long-lasting motivation to grow food.”

Since most cities have limited space available, Andersson had to get creative in designing his small-scale urban farming system in Malmö. He found that for an urban farm to be successful in Malmö, the design had to be adaptable and operable on a vertical plane– it all came down to the build of Nivå.

Inspired by the local architecture of Malmö, Andersson constructed each system by stacking steel beams together to create shelves and then reinforced those with wooden beams, providing plenty of stability. Deciding against the use of screws, Nivå’s deep, heat-treated pine planters latch onto the steel beams using a hook and latch method. Ultimately, Nivå’s final form is a type of urban farming workstation, even including a center workbench ideal for activities like chopping produce or pruning crops.

Designer: Jacob Alm Andersson

Following interviews with local residents, Andersson set out to create a farming system that works for the city’s green-thumb community.

Taking inspiration from community gardens and the local residents’ needs, Andersson found communal inspiration in Malmö.

Backyard and patio gardens are popular options for those living in cities who’d still like to have their very own gardening space.

Noticing the cyclical nature of community farms, Andersson knew that would be the crux of his design.

Following multiple ideations, Nivå ultimately assumes the form of a farming workstation.

Deep, voluminous soil pots provide plenty of room for growth and the high shelves allow vertical growing methods to persist.

Circling back to the community’s initial narrative, Nivå is a farming workstation solution that allows communities’ residents to farm together.

This tiny vegetable cultivator is an indoor garden for one, bring fresh food to your table!

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Now more than ever, I think we’re all itching to get outdoors to spend time in nature. Enjoying the natural pleasures of life, like gardening and cooking, has become a top priority for many of us. However, being stuck inside due to quarantine restrictions can make that difficult. I know I hardly have room on my window ledge for a hummingbird feeder, let alone a vegetable garden and I’m not the only one. Designers like Eun-Jeong Pi attempt to bridge the small spaces in which many of us live with our strong desires to still remain close to nature and live sustainably – Farmin, a smart vegetable cultivator designed by Pi, offers one such bridge.

Farmin is comprised of four main parts: the body, cover, seedling bags, and an LED lid. The body is definitely the hub of the vegetable cultivator, storing the soil, seedling bags, and water inlet. Along the left side of the body, an LED indicator signals to users when the soil in Farmin could use some water, which can then be distributed using the water inlet until filled completely. Then, on the right side, the body features an air filter that helps maintain the cultivator’s productivity and regulate the air that the plants breathe.

Dotted over the body’s surface, seedling bags provide good drainage and aeration for each cultivation period. Farmin’s transparent, yet foggy cover alludes to the morning fog in nature that nestles above evergreens in dense forests, working to remind users that their miniature vegetable garden can bring them closer to nature. Of course, the cover also works to contain the vegetable garden’s mature plants so that they don’t wilt or make a mess of your kitchenette. I know mine is already messy enough without any spilled soil. An LED lid also works to mimic sun rays for each vegetable to absorb and use as nutrients.

Nowadays, many of us have painted our thumbs green (even if the paint was toxic), and designs like Eun-Jeong Pi’s smart vegetable cultivator, Farmin provides the means to test them out and give smart home gardening a try. Millennials seemed to have been following this trajectory towards sustainable living for a while now and this time spent in quarantine has only solidified our dreams of cultivating our own small garden one day. Alexa, play ‘Garden Song’ by Phoebe Bridgers.

Designer: Eun-Jeong Pi

With the popularity of home gardening steadily increasing over the years, Eun-Jeong Pi created their own solution for small-scale gardening fit for your kitchen counter.

Through different ideations, Farmin ultimately assumed a soft and simple structure, allowing for intuitive operability and attractive display.

With an easy-to-use hinge door, Farmin hopes to help make home vegetable cultivation that much more accessible and the fruits of your labor that much more immediate.

An LED display offers different modes of operation, depending on the natural light that your vegetable garden might already be receiving. Turn on ‘Night Mode,’ when the sun goes down so that your home cultivator’s available light is maintained.

A slim water inlet allows users to nourish their garden with water, while an LED indicator signals when your soil might need some replenishment.

Farmin’s accompanying app provides users with the means to adjust the conditions inside Farmin so that their plants remain well-fed, while also offering fun tips for recipes and plant care.

This first ever nature preserve in Hong Kong brings the beauty of biodiversity to the concrete jungle!

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If you live in a city, nature might sometimes feel further away than it really is – and when you don’t have a car to take you up the coast to the mountains in a matter of hours, that distance feels even longer. Different institutions like museums and zoos are capable of taking us out of that urban haze for the moment, but soon enough, their icy exteriors, contemporary layout, and revolving doors spit us out onto the sidewalks, reminding us that our city ‘jungles’ still mostly consist of concrete. In Hong Kong, however, a nature preserve, built by LAAB Architects and PLandscape cozies up and beneath skyscrapers to change the urbanite’s relationship with nature.

LAAB Architects and PLandscape have teamed up to create The Nature Discovery Park, a rooftop nature conservatory that takes an educational approach to provide city dwellers with a much-needed escape to nature and lessons for younger generations in preserving their own city’s biodiversity. In order to embrace open-air facilities like restaurants and learning centers, the Nature Discovery Park is situated on the roof of Hong Kong’s harbor cultural center K11 MUSEA. Adaptive to unpredictable weather and air quality, the park’s main greenhouse utilizes telescopic sliding glass doors to facilitate naturally ventilated, alfresco learning experiences. The structure’s frame is constructed from steel and aluminum, while the interior attributes its furnishings to wood that was harvested from sustainably managed forests. The nature preserve’s own gardens are dotted and sprawling with plant boxes of Hong Kong’s prevalent biodiversity. Teeming with sweeping branches and long-leafed bushes that seem to overflow onto the grass walkways, guests of The Nature Discovery Park can follow the curated landscape, learning about the city’s natural life along the way. Finding its center between luscious greenery and butterfly gardens, the prefabricated greenhouse was installed on-site to avoid wasteful construction practices and keeps a hydroponic nursery, providing a no-soil means for horticulture.

The main keep of the nature preserve is also home to a farm-to-table dining experience and herbarium museum that showcases Hong Kong’s rich array of natural biodiversity and plant life native to its Victoria Harbor shores. The Nature Discovery Park is Hong Kong’s first biodiversity museum and sustainability-themed education park, offering workshops, tours, and interactive experiences related to both the vibrancy and diversity of Hong Kong’s ecological presence. Much Like The High Line in New York City, Nature Discovery Park’s gardens are curated and maintained to fit their city’s environment and allow guests to physically immerse themselves with the surrounding natural abundance.

Designer: LAAB Architects x PLandscape

These tables with built-in gardens is the perfect gardening hack every home needs!

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Living in smaller spaces often requires a lot of rearranging. I probably switch up my studio’s design on a monthly basis all in order to fit the ideal furniture to make the most out of the little space I have. Despite my efforts, I usually end up having to choose one item between three different pieces of furniture simply because my studio won’t fit more than that. This often makes it difficult to merge functionality with style. Of course, I’d much rather go for the loveseat over the desk, but where would I do my work? BloomingTables, dubbed “the world’s first living furniture line,” creates household tables that double as indoor gardens to cater to that exact dilemma.

It seems nowadays that people are trying to get closer and closer to nature, even in their own homes. Biophilic design is on the rise once more, and many of us who live in smaller spaces want to embrace nature indoors too. BloomingTables is a new biophilic desk design that embeds living plantlife into each table, just beneath the transparent, glass surface. BloomingTables comes in four variations: desk, coffee, entryway, and side tables. Each table is equipped with an acrylic tub that keeps the plant life, soil, and water in an airtight, designated space so that we won’t ever have to worry about leakage. The acrylic tubs are filled with layers of gravel and activated charcoal to absorb water and also to avoid the chance of overwatering the plant life. Once the soil layers are filled, we can then create our own arrangement of succulents, ferns, herbs, or even pebble art, ideal for those who like to cook, but don’t have enough room for both a desk and herb garden. The transparent glass surface adheres to suction cups and can be lifted to water the plant life below.

Each pinewood table comes in varying sizes, but come equipped with the same features, including a waterproof tub for soil and a twist-to-open drain valve on the off-chance your plant life is overwatered. BloomingTables, depending on the size ordered, can support up to 400lbs, which means this table design has successfully merged functionality with style. Everything from the painted steel hairpin legs and sheet of 6mm tempered glass, to the endless array of possible biophilic designs, echoes BloomingTables’ commitment to bringing the beauty of nature indoors.

Designer: BloomingTables

Click Here to Buy Now!

This smart gardening assistant solves the millennial problem of watering your plants while globetrotting!

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Taking care of new houseplants can be difficult. Mostly because we, and by we, I mean millennials, always end up bringing the tall full fern home where we imagine it cascading gently from the pot to the floor, but who are we kidding? We’re too distracted, plucking at the long leaves to hear the florist’s home instructions. It’s happened to the best of us and houseplants are more popular now than ever before, so it’s understandable. Thankfully, when it comes to plant care, designers are here to make it easy.

Wazai, from Abilliant, is an award-winning, wirelessly autonomous gardening assistant for your plant and comes with an app that allows you to care for your houseplants while you’re away from home, earning iF World Design’s 2020 Award for Product Design. According to each plant’s individual needs, Wazai waters your plant automatically and advises you of the best location for optimal sunlight. Wazai comes with two main components. The first, the inner pot, is what the user fills with fresh soil for the house plant to mix into, then the inner pot clicks into the bigger pot. Wazai runs using alkaline batteries that will have to be changed once every six months and the plastic used to produce the pot is UV-resistant, waterproof, and complete with a drainage system. Aligning the inner pot with the larger pot’s lock-and-click mechanism, the user can then pour around two liters worth of water into the larger pot from any angle. Then, Wazai takes over.

Once the houseplant is all settled in its new digs, the user connects it with Wazai’s phone app, which lists a wide range of houseplants to choose from. Once the app’s software matches the houseplant’s watering and sunlight needs, then it waters houseplants for the user through an automatic spraying function and will always let users know when batteries need replacing. Wazai determines what each houseplant needs through an interface that notes the quality and dryness of the inner pot’s soil. Additionally, since the app records humidity and sunlight data for every type of popular houseplant in the fully-integrated plant library found on the app, users can find out where to best position their houseplant indoors.

If you’ve got that coral-like, crimson-green Croton, then Wazai will search your room for the most direct, bright sunlight and water it only so often to keep the soil moist, but not wet. Or, if you’ve got a big, leafy fast-growing pot of ivy, then the app connected to Wazai will inform you of a space inside your room where there’s some sunlight, but not too much and ivy plants are thirsty ones, so Wazai will always keep the water flowing. Either way, Wazai’s got it covered.

Designer: Abilliant

This self-sustaining planter + composter takes the work out of indoor gardening

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To reduce their environmental impact, my parents have started composting their food waste. Great idea, but there are two small problems with their set-up: one, my parents aren’t gardeners, so the resulting manure is usually scattered on empty soil beds (which the weeds appreciate), and two, the composter lives in the backyard, which means they keep a plastic container on the back porch for their discarded orange peels and wilted salad (not the prettiest sight). Overall, the composter is not living up to its full potential, because it doesn’t suit my parents’ lifestyle.

Segue to the Sustainable Family Farm, a miniature composter and planter that is best suited for indoor life. When I saw this design, my first thought was Ah-hah, the perfect Christmas gift for my parents … in theory, since it hasn’t entered the market yet. A mini-composter isn’t a novel idea; in fact, you can make your own with a plastic jug, soil, and some worms. However, the Sustainable Family Farm sets itself apart in two ways: first, by integrating seamlessly into the household regardless of the members’ gardening/composting experience, second, by making gardening into a fun experience for the family.

The product accomplishes this first point by utilizing all the food waste in the household without requiring a lot of additional effort. All you have to do is dump your compostable scraps into the plant incubator and monitor your veggies’ growth. The amount of maintenance that goes into the gardening depends on the seeds you choose — and there plenty of low maintenance options, like basil or cilantro. The Sustainable Family Farm accomplishes its second goal, making gardening a fun activity with the power of smartphones. The planter features a companion app, which treats gardening as a game, showing the stages of plant growth as “levels” for your real-life veggies. If you were a teen in the late 2000s, you might remember the popular Facebook game, Farmville? Imagine that concept but in real life. Or, you know … regular farming. (Jeez, I’ve exposed myself as a phone-addicted city-dweller.)

The Sustainable Family Farm, I think, is one of the most accessible urban planter concepts I’ve seen. Its low maintenance process makes it as easy as possible for anyone to grow herbs or small vegetables. You just need to buy the seeds and worms to get started – the circle of life takes care of the rest.

This concept won the European Product Design Award in “Home Interior Products/Household Appliances” and “Design for Society/Design for Sustainability.” An earlier version of this design was also featured on Yanko Design.

Designer: Chaozhi Lin