The Greenhouse was a temporary building in Melbourne’s Federation Square designed to demonstrate a recyclable construction system, and an ecologically driven function room in the city. It was built on a tiny budget and short time program, with the room intended to operate for twelve weeks over summer, after which time it will be reconstructed and recycled. The structure is made from a custom folded super lightweight steel system holding a skin of encapsulated straw bale, form ply and a flexible clear acrylic curtain, as well as screens of wild strawberries stacked vertically in florists’ crates. It was both bar and café which, peeped out to Flinders Street, that the made the roof accessible from above.

This simple architectural gesture aimed its effect at the juxtaposition with the highly wrought geometry all around it, and from the sense that this is either a prototype for a permanent kit, or a piece of circus. It is an argument about a different set of values from Federation Square; a different idea of the city, and one that is complimentary to it.
This little building embodies a position toward the `ecological’ which is ephemeral and adaptable; low tech but not crafty. It straddles the slightly tired debate between the technological and the folk. And perhaps it is a little less determined and predictable.