During the Fall 2017 semester, undergraduate students in Dr. Donovan Finn‘s course EDP 404: Environmental Design Project developed designs for an organic garden located on the Stony Brook University campus. This is the capstone course for students majoring in Environmental Design, Policy and Planning requiring them to analyze and propose solutions to a real-world policy or design challenge.
This semester the students partnered with the Stony Brook Faculty Student Association to develop conceptual designs for an organic garden that FSA hopes to install in the open field between the new Chavez and Tubman residence halls. FSA plans to create a garden that will supply herbs to East Side Dining to help offset the $100,000 they spend annually on fresh herbs.
In multiple meetings with FSA staff and campus chefs, the students also learned that there was a desire to grow “superfoods” to be served in the dining halls, create a community gathering space, provide the opportunity for students to gain experience with organic gardening techniques and partner with faculty who could conduct research on innovative gardening techniques and related topics.
The students developed precedent studies of other campus organic gardens across the country, conducted an online survey of Stony Brook students, and worked individually and in teams to propose site plans for the layout of the garden, as well as branding recommendations, programming options, and simple business plans for operating and funding the garden.
Posters highlighting some of the recommendations from the team portion of the project were presented to the public on Thursday, December 7, 2017 in the atrium of East Side Dining.
View the photo album on Google Photos
The student posters are displayed below:
The Toll Terrace: Campus Garden Proposal
Madeline Schoenfeld, Amy Su, Stephen Schiavetta, Jiwon Kim
The Freight Farm will be renovated with solar panels and art decorations on the sides. The glass windows will also provide natural light for the crops growing inside. The Freight Farm will become a public space where student art can be displayed. This will give the community the chance to connect with the garden as well as make the area more lively.
Seasonal Events & Partnerships with local farms, summer camps, and child care centers will serve to educate local youth as well as to integrate community into the garden. Field trips to the garden will allow children to learn about farming and agriculture in an engaging, hands-on experience.
The Toll Terrace will be a bastion for sustainability education in the heart of one of the University’s newest student residential communities. It will contain a campus garden for use by East Side Dining, as well as a social space for students living in the surrounding dormitories.
Wolfie’s Garden
Michael Iorizzo, Vivian Chokry, Sijia Lu, Zhiying Zhao
Wolfie’s Garden is CHEMICAL FREE– implementing practices such as mulching and composting to develop healthy soils for growing crops. Wolfie’s Garden “provides a sustainable lifestyle through education and experience, while building a sense of community to create culture, inspiration and connectivity.”
Wolfie’s Garden is centered around the SUPERFOOD CIRCLE which contains amphitheater style seating from which garden beds form a radial pattern around. The garden features different aspects of gardening including a freight farm, greenhouse, composting area and 35 raised beds. Wolfie’s garden features a pond at the entrance and not only serves dining food purposes, but also as space people can go to for relaxation, socializing, learning, and exploration.
WG SBU: A Proposal for Wopowog Garden at Stony Brook University
Angelica Apolinaris, Daniel Panko, Shauna Wright
Wopowog is known to be the original name of the hamlet of Stony Brook as far back as the late 17th century. The name and design of the garden focuses on Native American language and culture: seasonal crops, architecture, and educational events will aim to recreate aspects of Native American culture.
Freight Farm: The freight farm design allows for a year-round growing season for the herbs. The safety of the crops will be ensured by using locking mechanisms on the doors. In order to establish the theme of Native American culture, the freight farm will be transformed into a replication of a longhouse using wood paneling and straw. The picture on the left shows the inside structure of a freight farm, which utilizes hydroponic techniques to save space and resources.
Geodesic Dome: Geodesic domes are an effective greenhouse structure because they contain the greatest volume for the least surface area. The structure is constricted from a number of latticed triangles. Biodomes are exceptional insulators, allowing us to extend the growing season of most every crop to almost a full year. The geodesic dome would focus on the three sisters crops: corn, beans, and squash. Initial conversations with Stony Brook chefs indicated a desire to grow super foods such as acai berries or avocados which can be easily accommodated in the temperature and humidity controlled environment of a biodome.
Wolfie’s Garden: A community garden for Stony Brook University
Bryan Benitez, Stephen Boncimino, Tingyu Lai, Shenglin Wang
ORIGIN: Medicine garden for pharmaceutical company Novartis in Sweden.
PURPOSE: The garden lined with herbs and flowers creates a beautiful effect in the recessed garden. The elevated walkways cut diagonally over the planting area. Also, the site filled with benches, tables, and chairs, with a border of greenery, to give it a park like setting. The design resembles an ancient physic garden. The symbolic nature of the garden is a tribute to the history of medicine.
FUNCTIONALITY: Serves as garden with Long Island-compatible moisture & self-sustaining drainage system Designed as a large rectangle with rows upon rows. Two elevated walkways cut diagonally over the planting area, more for visual effect than function.
Advantages: (1) no need to build extra infrastructures to build raised-bed (2) A sunken garden is designed to capture maximum rainfall and retain moisture, so they dry out less quickly, keep roots cooler, and lessen the need for irrigation.
Stony Brook Wolfie Garden
Bowen Chai, Bryan Gimler, Joseph Carney, and Tina Chen
The Blue Flag Iris is a flower that has the exceptional ability to absorb pollutants from the soil while adding aesthetic value to the space.
The Freight Farm is refitted shipping container that uses hydroponic gardening in order to minimize the resources needed to grow large quantities of produce. The sides of the structure could also act as a billboard.
Sun Loungers allow individuals to lie down and have a short rest. These allow for a full view of the garden.
A Vertical Garden draws attention to an area or disguises an unattractive view. Use structures or columnar trees to create vertical gardening rooms or define hidden spaces ready for discovery. The vertical garden grows tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, grapes, melons, strawberries, apples and squash.
