The Plant Room

Plant Room progression

Some great progress has been made with the project this week.

Firstly, we have established our budget for the production of both Plant Rooms! This is a fantastic achievement as we can now ask for some solid sponsorship with an accurate document to back our enquiries. The budget even includes the worms for our worm farms!

Secondly, our relationship with Product Spec is officially active. We now have some clear answers on specific materials needed for production and some security in knowing what we can obtain and what else we need to source.

Plant Room member, Jess, has been employed by Victoria University to be our official Project Manager. Jess will play an important role in overseeing every step of the Plant Room and being our ‘public face’. We will have a Plant Room team page up on our site soon, so you can find out more about Jess and other key members of the Plant Room team.

We are hoping to secure Aro St as an initial location for the container. In the meantime, Jesse and Tim have provided McAllister Heights and our glazing contractor with more drawings. We still need to confirm whether the glazing will be modified in order to install the Plant Room. We are looking for contractor sponsorship for the removal of the Plant Room and for the reinstallation of the glazing after the 2 year period.

This brings us to SPONSORSHIP! With our budget in place we now need to make connections with local businesses that are interested in sponsoring the Plant Room. We are all racking our brains to put together a list of people and/or companies to approach to make the Plant Room a reality. If you are interested in helping the Plant Room, contact us.

An initial render from July 2008

Check out this initial render and description of The Plant Room concept from Alexandra Hills in July of last year showing how the ‘clip-on’ Plant Room could be applied to existing building stock demonstrating how to convert an existing building into a carbon neutral development.

Our regenerative habitat “The Plant Room” is an inner-city project that will generate energy, collect water, recycle waste and grow food whilst addressing urgent housing needs. It includes a series of linked outdoor “rooms” to enliven, improve and extend an existing building. Bolt-on elements will be configured to provide four typologies that build upon each other: micro - an edible garden window box, mini - a balcony space, midi - an outdoor room and maxi - a communal space. We will be using “living” and eco-system services to improve the existing building fabric as well being a catalyst for change in the surrounding area.

The Plant Room is online

Welcome to The Plant Room’s new blog! Over the next months we will be documenting our progress here so check back often.

The idea of The Plant Room was born out of the realisation that our current building stock is likely to be with us for a long time and there is a tremendous opportunity to improve these buildings to make them more energy efficient, comfortable to live in and socially sustainable. The Plant Room is intended as a prefabricated room that bolts-on to a variety of existing apartment types, improving the quality of living and reducing energy and water use.

If you would like to learn more about the project, have a look on the About page or our Regional Team page on the Sustainable Habitat Challenge website.

We are looking for help! If you can offer any service, materials, finance, transport or your time, please let us know!