Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a Plant Room!

The Plant Room, a 'clip-on' greenhouse designed to soar high above street level and offer numerous eco-benefits to high-rise residents, enters the prototype stage. But will it ever fly?

Thu, Aug 05 2010 at 8:15 AM

Related Topics:

Green Design, Prefab

Images: The Plant Room

Back in April, my post on The Plant Room, a “clip-on” garden shed of sorts for high-rise, multifamily residential buildings generated a decent amount of dialogue from MNN users with reactions ranging from “that will never work” to “brilliant! I want one, building codes be damned” to “that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Since April, the Wellington, New Zealand-based Plant Room team has made a good amount of headway by moving the fantastic, and some would say far-fetched, green design concept into the prototype stage and further fleshing it out the Plant Room website. I thought I'd revisit it.

As you can see, the images I've included are pretty much self-explanatory but here’s a bit more on the Plant Room concept from the team:

The Plant Room is intended as a prefabricated room that bolts-on to a variety of existing apartment types, improving the quality of living, reducing energy and water use, and generally making the building more sustainable.

A Plant Room provides hot water for one occupant and a healthy growing space for herbs, fruit and vegetables all year round. It also offers a worm farm, a rainwater tank, an outdoor space and an enclosed room.

It shades the apartment to avoid summer overheating and collects hot air to circulate warmth in the winter. It is designed to improve the quality of apartment living while reducing the energy and water use of its occupants. It could also be a suitable solution to office retro-fits.

The Plant Room team plans to build two prototypes: one will be fitted on to the end of a shipping container and travel around New Zealand to “to communicate the ideas of sustainable building to the wider community.” The second prototype is the real deal, more or less: it will be fitted onto an apartment building and be “occupied, monitored and tested to establish the base level of performance of the unit and to drive future development of The Plant Room as a potential building product/component."

Check out the embedded video where the merits of the Plant Room are discussed by judges from New Zealand's 2009 Sustainable Habitat Challenge. Any further thoughts? Is the Plant Room silly, inspired, or just straight-out scary?

Via [TreeHugger]

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