Shell-Ter

In nowadays urban areas, the underserved population in low-income neighborhoods is suffering from the "food desert", having very limited access to affordable fresh and nutritious food. As a non-profit, the Prosperity Garden offers hands-on garden-based education, green business employment opportunities and affordable locally grown produce for Champaign-Urbana’s low-income residents, racial minorities and homeless people.

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As an interactive urban farming shelter, this extension of the Prosperity Garden Headquater facilitates it to address the inequity by creating a friendly and relaxing community gathering space featured with physically interactive growing units. Visitors can play with the pulley mechanisms to lift or drop the pots, creating an organic grid and immersive and impulsive visual experience. 

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When not in use, it is a scenery that refreshes one’s mood through its organic form and natural materiality. The high quality of the aesthetic of the design is being simple without lacking functionality. Deriving its harmonious organic form from the sprouting seeds that start from the lower level and splitting the seed coat while growing, this structure provides visitors narrative and meditative experiences while they are walking through the organic path and gather in the main chamber, taking a rest or engaging in interactions in different scales. The growing units are not only functional planters that produce fresh foods for the underrepresented population but also evoke people’s awareness of urban agriculture and inequity that the Prosperity Garden is seeking to address.