A good way to teach the kids about global warming and the importance of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is to design something they like and understand. An interactive solar power installation was designed by Buro North for Australian primary school yards with many purposes like to generate electricity, teach kids about renewable energy and to provide shade from the sun.
I have always encouraged green architecture and green structures therefore I am pleased to see any sustainable buildings to be born. The Italian-based architects, Iosa Ghini Associati, have designed an eco-house “with the aim of creating a new residential area alongside Pedieos River, near Nicosia, Cyprus”.
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I think everybody remembers the Masdar City, the first project of a zero-waste city, that Foster&Partners designed it for Abu Dhabi. Since Masdar was announced, we saw other projects like Auroville, in India and Dongtan, in China. Now, England gets is share of zero-carbon city as RIBA announced the winner for the visitor center at the new Brockholes Wetland and Woodland Nature Reserve in Preston.
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The New York magazine has had an interesting initiative with the purpose to improve the cleanliness of the New York City. They assigned four architects to came up with green structures that will be placed on the Canal Street and the most interesting idea came from Work AC.
Dan Wood, Work AC co-principal, thought that a farm would be liked by everyone therefore he designed a vertical green farm. Amale Andraos, another Work AC co-principal and also Dan Wood’s wife, said that they are concerned about “urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels]“.
The vertical farm will be called Locavore Fantasia and it will feature different crops at each level. These farms might not replace green roofs, but they certainly are a good alternative.
The British chemist and inventor James Lovelock predicted that in worst case, the whole humanity will retreat to the Poles within a century, because the areas around the tropics will roast by season of global warming.
Although this scenario seems more like science fiction than reality, Danny Bloom, a translator, editor and freelance writer living in Taiwan took this warning seriously and joined forces with artist Deng Cheng-Hong to imagine and represent how a city from an Arctic zone would look like.
Dr. Lovelock bases his prediction on the fact that Earth hosts a population of six billion and is headed to eight in just generations to come. He says that we need to learn to retreat from the world that we live in, and when we will try to stay away from the heat, we will migrate to the Poles.
There are already plans to intensify Arctic resources exploitation and test shipping routes could soon become practical if the floating sea ice in the Arctic will keep vanishing in summers. The Coast Guard is intended to establish the first permanent Arctic presence, that will be a helicopter station located in Barrow, Alaska, which is the most northern town in the United States.
