Digital fabrication has made state-of-the-art factory tools widely accessible, opening the door to on-demand production and offering a blueprint for how we might make and build things in the future.

The Growroom is an urban farming concept developed with architects Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husum. The concept explores food-producing architecture that enables people to grow food at home, at the office, or in shared public spaces. What should have been a one-off exhibition at CHART Art Fair in Copenhagen in 2016 became a shareable, downloadable design reaching cities around the world.

A downloadable garden

Bypassing the pollution of global shipping, we intentionally made the design open source, allowing anyone to download and build their own Growroom where they live. One month after its release, downloads surpassed the 30,000 mark and that number kept growing.

To build The Growroom, you need two rubber hammers, 16 sheets of plywood, and a visit to a local fab lab or makerspace equipped with a CNC milling machine. The Growroom is produced from a single, widely accessible material, and the design focuses on easy, intuitive assembly.

A global movement

Breaking with the industrial concept of centralised manufacturing is not new. Yet for many reasons, it hasn’t developed at scale — until now. With The Growroom we proved that if we make it easy and fun, people around the world are indeed ready — and excited — to download and create their own objects locally.