Sainthorto
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
Sainthorto is an interactive community garden designed for the wellbeing of people, plants, insects and sustainably providing food and ecosystem services.
Sainthorto is designed to recover interstitial and fragmented spaces of a city through a territorial regeneration strategy that aims to promote a close pact of reciprocity between the architecture of the urban environment and the agriculture according to the model of an integral ecology, providing bio-physical and socio-economic solutions.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
Sainthorto is an interactive vegetable garden designed for the wellbeing of people and plants, and equipped with a social technology that allows it to dialogue on the internet and water itself with a Tweet. Its design was made by an interdisciplinary team composed of architects, musicians, interaction designers, agronomists and psychologists with the aim of creating an immersive space characterized by a succession of full and empty triangles that follow one another according to a path with productive, educational and socio-recreational functions. The triangular tanks are alternated with spaces for cultivation, sound harps, seats for refreshment and interactive lighting. The asymmetrical and proportioned spaces, irregular and harmonious, create unusual tactile, olfactory and visual perspectives designed to encourage a complete experience, especially on a child's scale.
Sainthorto integrates a personal technology which is able to monitor in real time plants through a webcam system, manage the irrigation triggering dynamics of social gardening through Twitter and generate music and sounds always different following the musical score created by a composer. The musical project, in particular, aims to create an enveloping space by producing a soundscape where the melody changes as environmental and meteorological parameters change. The music is calculated in real time by the computer, then modulated by the interaction with visitors - through the sensors placed along its architecture - and by the environmental variables picked up by a weather station through which the variations of wind speed create densities of sound events. The temperature influences the choice of timbres according to semantic codes of warm and cold sounds, while the humidity modifies the general timbre by bathing it with echoes and reverberations.
Key objectives for sustainability
Sainthorto is entirely designed with sustainable, recyclable, and low-impact organic materials.
Phenolic marine pine and okumè are used for the architectural project, while recycled fishing rods and boat ropes arrange the harmonic structure of the sound harps.
Soil and plants complete the project shaping Sainthorto as an urban garden where architecture, technology, culture, music and nature meet involve the citizen in an active way within the requalification processes of the city. In addition, a rainwater recovery system allows Sainthorto to manage independently the irrigation allowing the project an important water saving.
Finally, a weather station equipped with anemometer and rain gauge allows to optimize the production of vegetables and fruit plants.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Harmony, a fundamental element of both natural ecosystems and music, is one of the aspects that characterize the project.
In Sainthorto, in fact, harmony is obtained in various forms ranging from the musical one, represented by the sound harps, to the one of the alternation of asymmetrical and irregular spaces, of full and empty spaces in proportion to each other. Each element that makes up Sainthorto is a module in its own right that allows it to be reconfigured in a different way depending on the context in which it is placed.
Nature is brought back to the center of the urban system - the same system that is increasingly damming up green areas due to incessant cementification - through the installation's tanks that contain various types of plants.
Man is the connecting element and more than ever necessary to allow the functioning of the ecosystem Sainthorto. The project is designed to accommodate people through the seats where you can relax, spend moments of conviviality, dialogue. All this is done by managing the irrigation system of the plants and making the harps resound.
All these formal and technological aspects coexist and make a complete sensory experience possible, by stimulating the olfactory, sound, visual and perceptive apparatus. These aspects show how it is possible to integrate technology in a sustainable and functional way in the search for a balance between nature and man.
Key objectives for inclusion
Sainthorto is a project of territorial regeneration that aims to promote a close pact of reciprocity between the architecture of the urban environment and agriculture according to the model of an integral ecology. The aim is to create interactive community gardens that provide, in a sustainable way, food and ecosystemic services.
All this through the recovery of interstitial and abandoned spaces, public or private, to be designed with the active support of citizens following a participatory and interdisciplinary design process and thus providing bio-physical and socio-economic solutions useful to build new models of coexistence based on inclusion, solidarity and cooperation.
Results in relation to category
Sainthorto is proposed as a fragment of a new vision of the city, more harmonious and emotional, based on the generative and experiential mapping of its ecosystem and the effect they have on individuals and communities. The aim is to identify and maintain the balance between space and the people. Sainthorto promotes a process of development of the urban environment no longer based on economic parameters but connected to an integral ecology.
It is a place where citizens get back in touch with their emotional sphere, linked to a clearer perception of the influence and variations of artificial and natural space. At the same time, it's a place where people can meet and exchange their emotions with the community, in which each individual maintains his or her singularity and contributes, in a very personal way, to the harmony that Sainthorto produces.
How Citizens benefit
Designed for abandoned or interstitial urban contexts, both public and private, Sainthorto was made to create a space of aggregation for the citizen, making it a key player in the process of redevelopment of the place where it's located. Interaction is the basis of the whole project, and through a device people can water the plants in the garden, or, through the movements and displacements of air that these can generate, the installation returns melodies peculiar to the moment through the use of Arduino.
The interaction with the installation allows the citizen to get the awareness that the weight of every single action has an impact on nature and how he must take care of it, also and above all through the use of technology.
Innovative character
In a world in constant and sudden change Sainthorto aims to bring people back to relate with their emotions and perceptions, making them aware again of the impact of their actions within ecosystems. The abandoned and forgotten places for which Sainthorto is designed are residual spaces that exacerbate the rift between the individual, the community and nature.
For this reason, Sainthorto aims to recover these spaces, public or private, and then redesign them through the active and participatory action of citizens, thus providing bio-physical and socio-economic solutions useful to build new models of coexistence based on inclusion, solidarity and cooperation.
