Francisco Fonseca and his workshop in Botanical Garden
solarpunkarchitecture.org
In the beginning of September I had a pleasure to take part in a workshop lead by the brilliant Francisco Fonseca from Oficina Pedrez. The task was to provide hands-on architectural knowledge to the students of interior design by doing some experimental work in Vilnius university botanical gardens in Vingis park. The team was given an old abandoned greenhouse and a lot of freedom. In just three days Francisco managed to organize a serious refresh of the space, including new floor from used b...

I stumbled on this brief article while looking through this solarpunk blog. On the farm I worked at growing up, all but one of our greenhouses were plastic stretched over a metal frame. We replaced the plastic fairly often (I’m not sure how often - I know I helped do it more than once, but probably not for the same greenhouse) due to sun and wind damage. The old plastic was pretty useless at that point unless you needed a dropcloth with some cracks in it, so it usually went in the dumpster and then to our local landfill.

It sounds like these folks soaked some sort of fabric in beeswax, and I’m curious how well that holds up. Certainly it’ll need replacing at some point, but so did the plastic, and at least the textile and wax can be composted eventually. Does anyone have any experience with this?

  • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 months ago

    I wonder if something like natural rubber on a thinner material would work better

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
      0·
      2 months ago

      Silicone soaked fabric is sometimes used for tents, but I guess that wouldn’t be biodegradable then.

    • Fermion@feddit.nl
      0·
      2 months ago

      I believe natural latex requires substantial uv stabilizers to not degrade in sunlight, but i suspect uv stabilizers would negatively affect the spectrum of transmitted light.