Manual for
SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE
 SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE, Copenhagen, 2011 |
Introduction:
The SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE is a full scale prototype of a new building system developed by N55 in collaboration with Anne Romme. The SPACEPLATES building system is a light weight, minimal material, low cost system that enables persons to build any scale of structures shaped as approximated double curved surfaces in a statically well defined way customized for living purposes, production purposes etc.
Background:
The SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE prototype is placed in public space on Krøyers Plads in the center of Copenhagen. It is an example of how food can be produced within the city. A parking space would be sufficient land to grow significant amounts of food. Because it is light-weight, easily constructed and moved, and because the overall size and form can be adjusted to any small available plot of land, the SPACEPLATE GREENHOUSE has the flexibility to be placed anywhere where people have the need and desire to grow food for a season or more.
The land which is now occupied by one-family houses in the suburbia surrounding all Western cities was once farming land for the production of food for the city. As the building of the suburbs has pushed farming land further and further away from the city, our food production gradually has become increasingly industrialized. Today the connection between the land of the suburbs and the dinner table of the city has almost disappeared. The SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE makes local food production possible for anyone who has the desire to grow and eat their own food.
A greenhouse is a contained quantity of air and light which extends the growing season and enables the thriving of plants otherwise alien to local climate. It creates a bubble of super-nature, where things otherwise impossible becomes possible. Even though almost completely transparent and thus in direct visual contact with its context, the smell, temperature, humidity and taste of things is significantly different than just outside the thin membrane. It enables us to create different kinds (or quantities) of food, but also to experience different climates and atmospheres. The SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE creates a significant place in everyday life.
Construction:
While the design is based on digital modeling and the production of the parts on CNC-technology, the assembly method is so simple that it allows anyone to construct their own greenhouse without a complicated instruction manual and with no other tools than a wrench or a drill to tighten nuts and bolts.
Even though this particular version of the SPACEPLATES greenhouse consists of 20 different parts, the simple geometry of interlocking hexagons of increasing size allows for just one configuration of the plates.Further development of the project will include a “design your own greenhouse” digital process, where also the size, overall form and geometrical pattern is adjustable according to individual desires and needs.
Cnc router used for producing the prototype
Initial scale model
Cnc Testing the structure by applying a swing to the top.( no sign of deformation)
Structure and geometry:
Unlike the classical load-bearing greenhouse structures based on compression (a stiff structure of posts and beams supporting the transparent cladding material) the SPACEPLATES GREENHOUSE takes advantage of its light material and a structural method called pure plate structures, which combines compression and tension forces working within the cladding material itself, needing no primary supportive structure. This also seperates the SPACEPLATE method from spaceframe constructions like the geodesic dome. lattice structures forming structures like that are very well researched and understood. Plate based structures are not. Especially not when it comes to more freely formed, complex, tesselated shapes that are not plain domes.
Pure plate structure is an elegant way of creating doubly-curved forms. Unlike the triangulated lattice structures used in much contemporary architecture, in pure plate structure the structural system and the cladding is one and the same thing.The geometrical and structural characteristics allow for extremely economical and simple building systems at any scale from small units to larger spans.
In this particular version of the SPACEPLATES greenhouse, the ratio of structural span/material thickness is 1:1333
Unlike Buckminster Fuller's well-known and well-tested domes where the number of different parts are kept at a minimum, the SPACEPLATES building system takes advantage of contemporary technology to mimic more complex naturally occurring geometries. Because of an organic growth principle, they often contain a gradience, and thus many geometrically similar but differently sized parts.
This version of the SPACEPLATES greenhouse is based on the sea urchin geometry, where hexagons of increasing size form a spherical form.
There is an intricate dependency between the geometry and the structural capacities of SPACEPLATES. Hexagonal tessellation results in Y-shaped vertices at any given joint, which allows for an ideal distribution of forces within the surface of each plate. This has been documented well in current research, see structural engineer Ture Westers work on this (for example “Structural order in space”) or structural engineer Anne Bagger's PhD dissertation.
To further remove the SPACEPLATES greenhouse from the well-known spherical domes, the overall form is distorted by the golden ratio so that the foot print is an ellipse rather than a circle.
Technical specifications:
PARTS
239 hexagonal polycarbonate plates, 3mm thickness, UV-protected.Appr.
138 mNeoprene rubber sealing
Bolts, nuts and washers
By N55 in collaboration with Anne Romme
Thanks to:
Kristin Saunders, Bill Mckenna, Nicolai Fontain, Jacob Coln, Lene Slot Hansen, Anne Bagger, Sam Kronick, Lena G Franck, Thom Gavin
Back to manuals
Back to HOME