This interesting product appeared last week from Inhabitat, consisting of small squares of grass for your desk or home. “These grass squares were designed at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel, in 2009 as a way to combine nature and architecture.” While a laudable concept in theory, the idea of bring in grass as a landscape component into buildings as a way to combine ‘nature’ into the environment is pretty misguided and downright funny to me.
:: image via Inhabitat
There’s a very vital way to include nature in buildings – called indoor plants, which actually provide benefits well beyond our monocultural lawn counterpart such as increased humidity, purification and removal of pollutants, and are much more beautiful than lawn. Plus, where does it end, when you end up having to buy a small lawnmower and trimmer, then continually spend weekends watering, fertilizing, and applying herbicide to keep your desk neat and groomed to stay within cultural expectations of care. 🙂
That’s funny, I saw this too. I agree, thinking that having grass inside as some sort of way of bringing nature is definitely absurd. Lawn is certainly not nature. But if it’s like a persons little reminder of the soft green blades they just ripped out at your house for a garden or some real vegetation then hey, why not, whatever makes people happy 😉 I think it’d be better if it were something edible though, like a square of wheat grass.
I have a small plot of artificial field turf that I keep on my desk… no watering or maintenance! I’ve had daydreams of covering the whole top of my desk with this stuff – could be an interesting nap spot for late nights!
It’s still a cool idea I guess but there’s something icky about referencing nature/architecture and using grass. On a related note, I was at Pottery Distributors in Portland last week and they have something similar in artificial turf – little 6×6″ fake grass mats that I really for some reason wanted them… I think you can get them at Cargo – so I’m sure they are insane. Maybe I’ll just order a short stack of sod and see how it goes. 🙂