Growing Greenhouse

The proposal of customizing and introducing a portable mini greenhouse kit for the use in patient rooms of the Charité psychiatric clinic in Berlin highlights the act and the process of ‘growing something’ as both vital and vitalizing.
 
By creating the conditions for a natural living system to exist indoors on a microscale, indoor and outdoor environments can be connected. The visually pleasing experience of greenery can be thereby expanded into one that engages multiple senses: the germinating seeds can be seen, touched, smelled, and tasted.
 
The experience of staying in a psychiatric clinic includes vague time spans of waiting. By providing an opportunity for a contained indoor sprouting seed activity, I want to introduce alternative possibilities of time and space perception, thus highlighting the cyclical character of natural processes and reinforcing the feelings of expectation, desire and hope.
 
The project engages with the ‘Biophilia hypothesis’ (Wilson, 1984), which emphasizes the need to relate to other forms of life as inherent to human nature. I  consider connectedness to non-human organisms such as plants indispensable to life. Addressed within the psychiatric context, the reciprocal benefits resulting from the processes of caring for another living organism and curing of the self are brought to the foreground as an essential factor of (mental) wellbeing.