GrowHub

By Arash Alborzi

A case study on community-based urban agriculture

Albertus Wang
Wang is a professor at the University of Florida Graduate School of Architecture. He holds a bachelor’s of architecture from the University of Florida and a master’s in architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Wang has a long and distinguished international (academic and practice) career in the fields of architecture, urban design/planning, interior architecture, and performing arts in Asia and the United States.


Located in East Gainesville, GrowHub is a community for cultivating, empowering, and assisting adults with disabilities for sustainable living through education, training, and employment. Established in 2016, GrowHub provides a wide range of opportunities to work — a harvest of urban business to meet a critical need faced by local students of varying abilities, who complete their schooling at age 22 and have limited options for meaningful employment, and veterans, who face barriers re-entering the traditional workplace. GrowHub’s mission is to create new collaborations with supplementary businesses aligning their targets with GrowHub’s goals to provide opportunities to employ aspiring human resources. It also collaborates with humanitarian organizations and individuals looking to make a real difference locally and support self-sufficiency through food, resource, and job security. Social service agencies such as Vocational Rehabilitation and the Center for Independent Living and Veterans Affairs also work with GrowHub.

In this interview, Albertus Wang, one of two lead designers of GrowHub’s master plan project, answers questions on the concepts and strategies used in its preliminary proposal. He was invited by Ruth Ron to collaborate on this exciting design opportunity. Wang has worked on a wide range of architecture, urban design, and interior design projects in the United States and Asia and has been recognized through awards from the American Institute of Architects and the Foshan International Urban Design Competition in Guangdong, China. His projects have been published in several books, magazines, and journals in the United States and abroad. He has served as the director and co-director of the University of Florida’s School of Architecture East-Asia Program (2010-2015) and as a co-coordinator and professor of the school’s Hong Kong/China Program (2007-2008). He has taught at the Boston Architectural College, the University of Pelita Harapan and UF and has been invited for lectures and design reviews at numerous international universities. He is a co-founder and a co-director of the European Historic Architecture and Urban Planning Program, a collaboration with the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (2015-present). His design interests focus on the critical dialogue and intersection between historical context and modern design of various scales and on East-West cultural exchanges.



Arash Alborzi (AA): GrowHub is a community for cultivating, empowering, and assisting adults with disabilities for sustainable living through education, training, and employment. How can civic architecture help GrowHub to pursue its strategies?

Albertus Wang (AW): My colleague Ruth Ron invited me to collaborate in developing a master plan for GrowHub. Since GrowHub is a community-based effort, maybe the term “civic” architecture can be toned down to something that is more related to its main purpose — “community-based” architecture and garden. To make GrowHub sustainable, not only ecologically, but also socioeconomically, it needs a well-thought-out master plan with several supporting architecture components and series of productive gardens within it. We adopt seven programmatic components. Those are the seed studio, where seeds are being handled and then stored; the seed bank; the seed library; the arts and medicine, which includes the training center, gallery, and art shop; the outdoor kitchen and dining; the greenhouses for certain plants that need some controlled environment to grow; and of course the garden itself. These programs partially exist on site and are loosely connected. We thought that they need to be tightened up and the programmatic hierarchy and relationship between components need to be simplified and refined.

I am a firm believer that architecture needs to comprise of two aspects: the programmatic/functional aspects (the “ethical” aspects) and the spatial/spiritual experiences (and the experience of the senses) within it (the “poetic” aspects). What I mean by the ethical aspects are, for example: 1) The seed studio should have an indirect sunlight to allow healthy working space but also protect the seeds from direct sunlight; it also needs to have good workflow. 2) The seed bank should have an organized arrangement and safe to store the seeds for a long period of time. 3) The seed library allows users access to the materials systematically. 4) The arts and medicine is an existing room, and the new design can incorporate the existing but needs to have more dedicated spaces for teaching and studio workspace, a gallery, and an art shop to sell their arts. 5) The outdoor kitchen and dining expose GrowHub to the community at large and draw in additional patrons and participants. 6) The greenhouses need to be designed according to the set criteria. 7) The layout of the gardens needs to be based on the efficiency and effectiveness of the workflow because GrowHub is, in a way, a productive community-based entity.

However, aside from those functions, spatial/spiritual experiences, and again the experience of the senses (touch, see, smell, hear, taste, and feel), are also very crucial. For instance: 1) In the seed workspace, how sunlight indirectly enters the space and how the choice of materials and colors of the ceiling and walls would allow the people who work in this space to be inspired. 2) and 3) Aside from the references and books, the sampling of the seeds themselves could be a part of the seed library collection for the purpose of education and training. In the seed bank, seed could be displayed attractively to inspire students, patrons, and visitors. 4) In the arts and medicine space, the roles of “arts” need to be apparent in its architecture and interior design aspects. Walls can be used for displaying arts for education, exhibition, and gallery shop. 5) As a component that could subsidize the GrowHub activities, the outdoor kitchen and dining need to be designed to stimulate patrons and visitors. They need to feel inspired by being in a beautiful garden enjoying the company and good healthy food, while doing it for a good cause. 6) The idea of having the dining room partially in the greenhouse, for instance, could allow educational experience while enjoying meals. I have seen this being done, for instance, at the Mediamatic in Amsterdam. 7) The garden has one unbeatable aspect: That is the plants, the flowers. I presume everyone loves to be surrounded by greens and colorful flowers. Being in a garden gives me a very beautiful feeling and recollection. In my culture, we refer to this special experience as a spiritual longing for “Firdaus” [paradise]. In a garden, I immerse in its colors, fragrance, and reminiscence of this very special and beautiful place. Some garden areas can be more rationally organized; some can be more natural and wilder. The interplay between garden and architecture, allowing them to celebrate each other, spiritually can be very evoking. So, when working on the layout, a designer must understand the poetic potentials of a garden.

In short, with a well-thought-out, community-based master plan and innovative architecture/garden design, GrowHub has the opportunity and potential to make itself an effective community hub, connected to other urban/suburban hubs within Alachua-Duval counties.

AA: Urban farming has the pivotal role in relation to the development and success of GrowHub. How does your design advance the role of urban farming in GrowHub? Would you please explain and elaborate your concepts for this project?

AW: Currently, GrowHub is operating more as an urban garden, focusing on continuing education and employment for people with physical and intellectual barriers and collecting/storing native seeds. However, it has a potential to incorporate broader urban farming. To reach that level, GrowHub has to work on its infrastructure, which include organizational, technological (information technology and operational technology), and finally the design and master planning that I mentioned in my answer to your question above. The organizational infrastructure can meaningfully increase efficiency and effectiveness on its daily operation, allowing the community to participate in it even more. The technological infrastructure could allow GrowHub to access necessary resources, as well as allowing people in the community and beyond to access the seed inventory at GrowHub. Finally, as I mentioned in point the first response, design allows both ethical and poetical impacts.

In Figure 1, GrowHub configuration of garden and supporting components grow organically. In Figure 2, we want our preliminary design to be more realistic and inexpensive, trying to utilize and optimize existing components as much as possible.

Refer to master plan and legends for elements and their descriptions below:

1. Pavement/Pathway: We thought the most important aspect is to identify the paths as organizational components and as the way to experience the area. We utilize and connect existing paths with some inexpensive, natural, and beautiful paving techniques I learned while I lived in Indonesia, casting interesting leaves on wet cement pavement. (See Figures 3 and 4.)
2. Entry Plaza: A sense of community arrival is a very important and powerful tool to begin experiencing this place. This plaza will be almost like an Italian piazza, a void that has either no function or all functions. It is a multi-purpose space that will be used for different functions in different times. In order to make this void, we need to activate the surroundings or, in other words, to create activated programmatic architectural or garden components that contain this plaza.
3. Inner Plaza: This is a spatial echo of the entry plaza, but it is more intimate and embedded more within the garden. This inner plaza has more specific functions, which operate within the idea of communal space, enjoyment, and appreciation of good, healthy, comestible products that are locally grown and experience GrowHub as a community garden and farm.
4. Open kitchen and dining will be located adjacent to the inner plaza, using the backdrop of Florida landscape.
5. Wooden planters are used as a boundary to prevent wildlife from destroying the garden.
6. Entry planters are used to accentuate the entry gate.
7. Life fence is also created around the property to prevent wildlife, such as deer, from entering into the property and consuming the plants in the garden.
8. Other functions (or architects like to call them “programs”) are absorbed and framed within the pathway so that they operate within clear organizational quadrants; they now are both structured as well as organic.

We hope this master plan approach could optimize the existing GrowHub’s programmatic components without designing from tabula rasa (blank slate), which is unrealistic, unaffordable, wasteful, and less interesting. On the architectural design, a similar adapt-and-reuse (or in another term — repurposing) approach is adopted.

AA: Social-based urban farming is a promoted trend in urban agriculture. In your opinion, how can you extend the concepts of GrowHub through Gainesville or other cities? Basically, which advantages and disadvantages do you expect in such projects?

AW: I think urban gardening, urban farming, and community-based activities need to be evaluated in case-by-case scenarios and unique to each place. So, let me try to answer only on how GrowHub can be the catalyst to create urban linkages of productive urban farming and gardening, which connect existing components within Duval and Alachua counties.

So, I think by activating GrowHub and making it as an initiator to connect already existing urban initiatives to experiencing locality, in terms of urban farming, gardening, and other community efforts, is not only interesting, but also crucial. Now that we experience the global impact of an event, COVID-19, all of a sudden, we are awakened by the reality that local initiatives are the only way to guarantee not only survival, but also sustainable livelihood, but without abandoning the reality and profound understanding that we are all in this together as a nation and as a human race; that we are all connected and must rebuild our local and global environment together.

Author Bio:

Arash Alborzi
Alborzi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida School of Architecture in Gainesville. His dissertation focuses on feasibility of urban agriculture in existing cities. He has over 10 years of engagement in design, teaching, and research.