Green Design Festival . Athens

Description extracted from http://www.flickr.com/people/greendesignfestival

The idea

Green Design Festival is an original, public, free cultural event under the aegis of the City of Athens. It aims at fostering a wider understanding about environmental and ecological issues amongst the citizens of Athens and beyond. Green Design Athens is produced by BRAINLAB FOUNDATION a non profit Greek Company. (www.brainlab.gr)

Using new technologies, powerful imagery and design, this festival will transform Athens into a lively, interactive space which will present proposals and ideas about how everyday life could be greener and more friendly to the environment.

Participants include over 70 architects, industrial designers, graphic designers, fashion and street artists, who have worked on the theme of the festival on projects who embrace the non-connoisseur.

Programme

The programme of the festival revolves around the ‘ecomuseum of green design’, a green contemporary open playground at Syntagma Square. The ecomuseum showcases the vast majority of projects in a light, alternative construction which will host exhibitions of photography, eco-conscious fashion, industrial design, video art and mixed media, a green library and a small open-air amphitheatre made of wooden re-used palettes for concerts and educational activities. Entrance is free.

In selected central points of Athens, two big events will be presented. With the participation of the most vibrant street artists of Athens, the center of the city will be turned into a colourful forest of huge graffiti trees. Also, distinguished graphic artists will create various interactive imaginary maps of the city, which can be freely downloaded to almost any mobile phone inviting the public to take part in a vast interactive green game.

During Green Design Festival, Athens will present it first vertical garden, embracing one of the most popular trends in landscape design internationally. Accordingly, guerrilla motion design videos will be upload on the web, inviting everyone to become a ‘guerrilla gardener’ of the city by creating green where it does not exist.



related links -
official youtube page of the festival
brainlab - agency for organising the festival
graphics collection for the festival in flickr

GreenPix - Zero Energy Media Wall

Extracted from Arup's beijing projects website


In West Beijing, the city's thriving artist community has a new and unusual 'canvas' on which to experiment: the GreenPix - Zero Energy Media Wall, which is the largest colour light-emitting diode (LED) light wall in the world.

The GreenPix - Zero Energy Media Wall is a major new focus for the digital artist community. The futuristic LED lighting system is capable of displaying moving images on a screen made up of 2,000 individually programmable LED colour nodes.

The 60 meter by 33 meter laminated glass facade is designed with artistic potential in mind. It offers media and digital artists an almost infinite range of possibilities, lending itself particularly well to artistic interpretation.

This virtuoso feat of engineering and lighting design is also a striking example of energy efficiency, with photovoltaic arrays on the building capturing twice as much energy from the sun than the lighting facade consumes.

Like any new structure in Beijing, the facade has been engineered to comply with Beijing's seismic regulations, and is entirely self-supporting.

The Chinese contemporary art scene has experienced a major expansion in recent years, with many artists now competing in the international contemporary art commercial market. With significant Chinese art exhibitions taking place in Europe during 2008, Beijing has developed as a centre for world-class art.

The GreenPix - Zero Energy Media Wall will galvanise an energetic artistic community and produce a valued, ever-changing public work of art that becomes part of the everyday lives of residents.

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Further reading (with images & videos) -

Official website of Greenpix - http://www.greenpix.org/
Overview of Greenpix in Arup Beijing Projects web - http://www.arupinbeijing.com/arup_projects/green_pix/overview
Flickr pool of Greenpix - http://www.flickr.com/search/?ss=2&ct=5&w=all&q=greenpix&m=text
Youtube pool of Greenpix - http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=greenpix&search_type=

The next generation urban park - The High Line in New York

With more and more people in the world living in cities, how could we create a new type of sustainable urban environment that not only demolish old buildings and dissect neighbourhoods for new construction?

There may be an answer laid in the High Line in New York. It is an elevated rail network on bridges spanning 22 blocks and 1.45 miles long through three of Manhattan's most dynamic neighborhoods: Hell's Kitchen/Hudson Yards, West Chelsea, and the Gansevoort Market Historic District. The railway line was used to transport goods from one side of the city to the other without disturbing street level traffic but was gradually declined after the 1950s.



Since the mid 1980s, a group of private property owners who purchased land under the High Line at prices that reflected its easement have lobbied for demolition of the entire structure. Much credit for the fact that the High Line survived the demolition efforts in the mid- and late 1980s goes to Peter Obletz, a Chelsea resident, activist, and railroad enthusiast, who challenged demolition efforts in court and tried to reestablish rail service on the Line. In 1999 Friends of the High Line (FHL) was founded by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to advocate for the High Line's preservation and reuse as public open space.



A design competition was hold in 2003. The final proposal to be constructed is being designed by Field Operations (landscape architects) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (architects). It would create a fabulous stripe of public open space travelling through building blocks at an elevated level in a scale never realised before in the world. Such dynamic creation would inject much vibrancy in the local life of the neighbourhoods, liven up streets and bring another green dimension to the city.



Below is a 6 minute documentary made by the Friends of the High Line offering an overview of High Line, its history, the movement to save it, and designs for its reuse. Directed and produced by John Zieman -



Finally there is something which makes me really want to visit New York. Looking back to Hongkong, while we have 2 gigantic vacant plots next to the harbour - the West Kowloon and the Kai Tak, have we ever thought about how we could plan these spaces so that they would become a generator for the surrounding neighbourhoods as well? And for other urban regeneration projects, being overseen by the Urban Renewal Authority, who has the vision to not just focus on separate plots but to create strategic linkages across the neighbourhood like the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator to bring in another dimension to the city fabric?

Even for the proclaimed success of the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator, is there anybody living in the area thinking on further evolution of the escalator? Perhaps we could have a Central-Mid-Levels Escalator 2.0, which could be either introducing green spaces on top / bottom of the existing escalator, or onstructing green skywalks similar to the High Line connecting the various levels of life?

Or look at the pedestrain footbridge networks we have around Central and Wanchai. Could the government actually co-operate with the developers of nearby commercial buildings to refurbish them and integrate green features and plants fully with the footbridge so we could have some fluid park spaces across the city where everybody could have a rest or enjoy their commute? This additional density of green would not cause any negative impact on the existing infrastructure, but instead further enhance the cityscape.

Further reading -

official website - http://www.thehighline.org
photo gallery - http://www.flickr.com/photos/friendsofthehighline
design competition entries - http://www.thehighline.org/competition
similar projects around the world - http://www.thehighline.org/about/similarprojects.html
central-mid-levels escalator - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central-Mid-Levels_escalators