This was fun: I opened up the Museum of Modern Art gift catalog yesterday and saw this on page 2, the Andrea Air Purifier. Instead of filters or electric charges, Matthieu Lehanneur’s machine from 2007 uses a live plant.

Once again I get the feeling that gardeners are way ahead of the curve. Plants to clean the air? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?

And then there’s the matter of the price tag $199, plant not included. Yikes. But the manufacturer makes some claims about how the gizmo is lots more efficient than traditional purifiers or even plants:

Based on experiments performed by RTP Labs, Andrea improves the efficiency of formaldehyde removal from the air relative to plants alone by 360%. Relative to HEPA and carbon filters, comparison between the RTP Labs data and literature data show an improvement in formaldehyde filtration efficiency of 4400%. These data confirm that while plants alone in an interior setting are more efficient than HEPA and carbon filters at removing toxic gases from the air, they are significantly less efficient than Andrea. Even more important, the rate of gas removal by Andrea is, according to the RTP Labs data, over 1000% faster than for plants alone.

Much of the technological magic appears to be due a fan that circulates air around the plant and then into the room–something that you could probably rig up in the privacy of your own home. (Be prepared to water your plant more often.) As a fun piece of conceptual art that was part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, the price wouldn’t be that outrageous. But as a functional appliance I’d probably opt for a few little green machines, growing and photosynthesizing and blooming through the winter doldrum months…