All photos: Marco Garofalo for Boeri Studio

The world’s first vertical forest (trademark?) is rising in Milan. The Bosco Verticale, the project’s official title, will be completed later this year, marking a significant step in development of green architecture. The plan consists of two apartment towers festooned with a series of concrete decks, staggered and offset from each other to give the structures their Jenga-like appearance. Once completed, nearly 2.5 acres of “forest” will have been planted in these balconies, helping to absorb dust—a major problem in Milan—and C02, while shading and cooling the residents within. More images, including construction photos, after the jump.

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Costa Rica’s motto may be “pura vida” (pure life), but the country has a big trash problem. More than 60% of the 2400 tons of garbage produced daily in this tourism hot spot ends up in unregulated, open junkyards; less than 10% is recycled. Even worse, 250 tons are dumped into Costa Rica’s beautiful rivers and tropical forests every day. That’s why a group of architecture students from New York Institute of Technology has begun building a recycling and education center in the Costa Rican town of Nosara. Now, the students, led by NYIT professor Tobias Holler, of HOLLER Architecture, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to complete the center, and document the process. Read more!

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Traffic is Public Enemy #1 in Los Angeles, probably followed by smoggy skies. Thankfully, local sculptor Stephen Glassman has created a gorgeous solution to both issues with his bamboo billboard!  Named “Urban Air,” Glassman’s award-winning project trades a traditional billboard for a suspended bamboo garden, complete with pod misters that not only water the plants but create a neat cloud effect. The bamboo billboard brightens up the highway while also helping to clean LA’s notorious smoggy air. Read more!

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Intent on reducing CO2 emissions from the neighboring Eisenhower Expressway, architects Danny Mui and Benjamin Sahagun have proposed splitting Chicago’s Congress Gateway Towers and applying a system of filtration devices to clean air pollutants. The multi-step process begins with the absorption of CO2 emissions from passing cars, which are then fed to algae grown in the building in order to help process the biofuels that supply the building residents’ cars. Read more.

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All photos: Studio Swine

Plastic is forever, more or less. Recent studies estimate that an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic can be found per square kilometer of the world’s oceans, while the UN reports that the number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years. Even more alarming is the nearly incomprehensible 100 million tons of plastic waste deposited worldwide, with that figure expected to double in the next ten years alone. Where to go out of this bleak?

Studio Swine and Kieren Jones‘ “Sea Chair” seeks a way to collect this stray plastic and harvest it for constructive ends. Launched this past spring at the Milan Furniture Fair, the chair is made entirely of debris collected and processed through a series of custom devices.

Inspired by early mining equipment, the designed developed a curious contraption–made of salvaged machinery and dubbed ‘The Nurdler’ after the industrial plastic pellets it collects–whose chief function sorts large quantities of debris from the water as simply and efficiently as possible. The Nurdler consists of a hand powered water pump and a sluice that sifts the micro plastic pellets, plus a flotation tank that ensures the recycling of those elusive plastic pellets, separating the debris by density.

The “Sea Chair” was fabricated with bits of plastic collected from Porthowan Beach, one of the UK’s most polluted beaches. The fodder was then fed into the “Sea Press”, a furnace and hydraulic press combo that compresses the debris–plastic intermixed with seawood, wood, and shells–into disks and molds. The press is compact enough to fit on a sea frigate, and so, according to the designers, “enable[s] production at sea”. Once the stools have been cast, they are tagged with a production number and coordinates according to the geographic location of its sandy contents.

[via StudioSwine]

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Images of FLOAT Beijing by FLOAT

Air quality in China is notoriously poor, with visibility often shrinking to nothing, and combated with the ubiquitous donning of the surgical face mask. The government has sought ways to control information about urban pollution, with the deputy minister of Environmental Protection scolding the U.S. Embassy for its practice of tweeting air quality data hourly. Seeking a way to circumvent the data blockade, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard students Deren Guler and Xiaowei Wang are putting air quality measurement technologies in the peoples’ hands.

GOOD looks into the project, FLOAT Beijing, that makes innovative use of an ancient technology and long-time recreational instrument–kites. Each kite is equipped with a sensor, which then glows with different colors based on certain air quality metrics. Employed en masse, the kites will create a spectral flotilla in Beijing’s night sky – if you can see them through the smog, that is. The project recently started a Kickstarter page, and has already received several grants, in part, due to its DIY and grassroots aspects: each participant in the project will make their own kite by hand. Continue.

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Image (c) Harry Zernike On Earth.

Fenceline communities are neighborhoods located adjacent to chemical plants or  industrial facilities. It’s not a term you hear very often, unless you work in environmental law or come from a town embroiled in conflict over illegal pollution. And small wonder: companies (and lobbyists) spend millions to suppress the negative publicity that comes with producing toxic chemicals within a few hundred yards of humans.

Yet the fight for environmental justice in many American fenceline communities have received an unexpected boost in recent years, from an unlikely source: DIY technology. GOOD’s Ben Jervey reports on one MIT Media Lab project called Grassroots Mapping, that’s helping average citizens discover powerful evidence of environmental damage in their communities using cheap, off-the-shelf parts. And he’s not the first to spearhead a movement to bring accessible technology to communities fighting for environmental justice. Keep Reading.

Image (c) Jeffrey Warren, via Flickr.

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