The Fountain Of Health
What may sound like a highly bizarre concept is actually a new method, from Bureau A, to manufacture health supplements. With their project The Spirulina Fountain, they rearrange the formulae of landscape architecture and gardening to deal with contemporary issues regarding green alternatives to industrial production in infertile areas.
The Spirulina Fountain, located in a public park of Geneva, is an innovative fountain/laboratory hybrid: it wittily combines the production of intense blue-green algae with the contemplative Italian gardens of the 16th century.
This blue-green, or Spirulina, algae is a plant which is used as a food supplement due to its very high nutritional value — it is composed of arthrospira bacteria and one of the only vegetable protein sources containing all amino acids as well as numerous vitamins and antioxidants.
Usually the ‘blue algae’ is industrially cultivated which obviously means it is produced in a rather unsustainable and, I can only guess, unsightly fashion. The Spirulina Fountain therefore tackles these two disadvantages by generating highly nutritious food in a beautiful landscape feature, which plays harmoniously with the historical context and references of Geneva.