We found this incredible hydroponic installation through Elizabeth Cohn-Martin, a masters student at Columbia that helped develop it. Read about their innovative irrigation strategy and the vision of the project:
The PLANTLAB is an experiment in hydroponic gardening, designed and built by graduate architecture and landscape architecture students at UC Berkeley. Sponsored by the San Francisco Garden Show, 3rd Street Hydroponics, and Ewing Irrigation, the PLANTLAB is currently installed at the SF Garden Show, in the San Mateo Event Center, through March 27, 2011.
The PLANTLAB is a volumetric field of edible plants, grown using hydroponic methods to expose and articulate the use of water in the “living California garden”. We are producing vegetables in an indoor garden that does not rely on traditional methods of planting embedded in the earth. Rather than constructing a new ground, the garden is formed by a cloud of 432 suspended crystalline tubes and water distribution systems that allow visitors to circulate around the garden and inhabit the space beneath it. Each recyclable clear plastic tube contains a plant, an inorganic growing medium, and a connection to a drip irrigation system, which circulates nutrient infused water from a submersible pump in a reservoir. These interconnected systems are suspended from a light steel frame that also supports a custom array of UV lights. The polished concrete floor of the exhibition hall remains explicitly unfinished to intensify the synthetic quality of the installation as an experimental plant laboratory.
PLANTLAB is: Chris DeHenzel, Brian Gillett, Rockne Hanish, Elizabeth Cohn-Martin, Morgan Petrovich, Michael Cook, Darryl Jones
