In 2009, The Building Centre in London commissioned Bohn to develop a live food-growing experience for the centre's exhibition London Yields: Urban Agriculture, the UK's first urban agriculture exhibition. The premise underlying the show was to highlight a shifting understanding in urban design from “cities as consumers of food” to “cities as food producers”.
Titled The Urban Agriculture Curtain, Bohn’s fully-functioning prototype was the only commissioned exhibit. In design research collaboration with André Viljoen, it resulted in an indoor hydroponic installation producing a rotating crop of salads, herbs and vegetables and was built in collaboration with Hadlow Agricultural College which also provided expert consultancy. The installation proposes the vertical, indoor growing of fresh produce thereby suggesting a new way of furnishing an office, cafe or flat. The growing field is four times as space efficient as its horizontal equivalent. The high-yield and low-maintenance prototype produces food all year round, ready to be eaten off the plant.
The Urban Agriculture Curtain deepened earlier research about the significance of architectural and artistic practices within the urban agricultural discourse, notably on the 2005–6 Utilitarian Dreams project (funded by the British Council, Gasworks, Triangle Arts Trust and the University of Brighton). The installation continues tangibly Bohn's investigations into ways in which urban agriculture’s spatial consequences for urban design and architecture might be most effectively visualised and experienced.
The Urban Agriculture Curtain led to a further commission, from Sustain (a UK-based, internationally recognised charity campaigning for better food and farming), to contribute “hydroponic balconies” to its Capital Growth ‘Edible Spaces’ project at the Royal Horticulture Society's (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show (2009). This project was also concerned with intensive food growing in small urban spaces without access to soil along with the need for high yields and minimal gardening time. Edible Spaces was seen by 160,000 visitors and was the topic of a BBC broadcast. Since 2009, The Urban Agriculture Curtain is part of the international travelling exhibition and online resource, Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture, and has been shown in many countries including Canada, France, Germany, UK, Morocco, The Netherlands, Portugal and the USA. The project's images have been requested for inclusion in numerous exhibitions and publications.
>>> for further details see: * this website's projects listing; * this website's repository.