Tag Archives: Environmental awareness

This floating bubble visualization by Carlo Ratti emphasizes forestry by showing how much carbon dioxide each tree absorbs

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Escaping city sidewalks and standstill traffic for a botanical garden’s grassy lawn lined with rows of trees, butterfly gardens, and flower bushes seems like a deal most of us would be willing to make. While they offer a nice respite from the bustle of city life, trips to the botanical garden also make for insightful learning experiences. In the Brera Botanical Garden, in Milan, energy company Eni and international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati have introduced Natural Capital, one of the largest data visualizations ever produced to showcase the importance of trees for a sustainable world.

With sights set on being one of the largest data visualizations in the world, Natural Capital demonstrates how trees store carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, driving home the importance of forest protection. Extending over Milan’s 500-square-meter garden, Natural Capital showcases plots of floating bubbles that project the amount of carbon dioxide their corresponding trees can capture and store during their life cycle. Walking through Brera Botanical Garden, guests will be met with three-dimensional graphics that showcase the key role that forests play in providing living things with healthy air to breathe, hinting at the symbiotic relationship between trees and humans. Bringing the point full circle, guests will be greeted at Brera Botanical Garden’s entrance by a stationary, giant sphere that illustrates the average amount of carbon dioxide produced by the human body per year.

Speaking on the contrast between the trees’ floating bubbles and the park’s giant stationary sphere, the designers say that it “illuminates the fundamental role that plants play in guaranteeing the planet’s health and limiting global warming. The comparison allows visitors to understand the symbiosis between humans and nature: the former produces carbon dioxide, the latter stores it.” Continuing their collaboration in exploring new circular economy and sustainability paradigms, CRA and Eni remain committed to protecting and conserving forests through decarbonization projects that aim for a more sustainable world.

Designer: Eni x Carlo Ratti Associati

Floating near their corresponding tree or shrub, each bubble will display the plant’s scientific name, age, and amount of carbon dioxide it will store during its lifetime.

Walking through Brera Botanical Garden, guests will learn about the symbiotic relationship between humans’ need for oxygen and trees’ ability to produce it through storing carbon dioxide.

Designers behind Natural Capital note that “Natural Capital aims to experiment with a new design medium, turning data visualization into a tangible, spatial experience, bringing the natural and the artificial worlds a little bit closer together.”

Sustainable design in architecture award-winning primary school will be Denmark’s first Ecolabel School this 2022!

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Renowned architecture firm Henning Larsen has commenced construction on their landmark primary school project in Sundby, Copenhagen. Contributing to the country’s agenda for sustainable educational facility architecture, the New School in Sundby ensures high sustainability parameters as well as integration with the school’s surrounding, local community. Opening its doors to 580 new students by the end of summer 2022, the New School is nature-oriented and built to merge the classroom with the environment.

Henning Larsen is an architecture firm driven to create structures that double as agents for sustainable change, first looking at what their designs can do for people and local communities. Built with the same driving ambition, their New School in Sundby supports and achieves the UN’s Sustainable Development goals from the ground up through sustainable structural design and the promise to enact a curriculum that coincides with the UN’s environmental efforts. In order to incorporate nature into the school’s curriculum, architects envisioned the surrounding environment as alternative classrooms by literally merging the school with the ground below it.

Located miles away from the burgeoning city centers of Copenhagen, The New School nestles itself in the winding hills of Denmark’s countryside. The New School in Sundby features a living roof that slopes into the grassland below it, ascending into a semi-circle that positions itself just above the ground below. Geometric windows and modules give the New School a progressive whimsy that balances the practical and unadorned integration of the natural environment. Rewarding architectural strides in sustainability factors, like low-greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and waste, as well as health factors like ventilation, natural light, noise, and chemical exposure, the New School in Sundby will be Denmark’s first primary school to be awarded the Nordic Ecolabel.

Designer: Henning Larsen

The New School in Sundby follows a circular structure, forming a semi-circle upon completion.

Henning Larsen architecture firm has broken down on new sustainable primary school in Denmark.

Geometric windows and facades line the interior facade of the New School in Sundby.

Inside, natural wood and concrete finishes give rise to multiple levels.

Henning Larsen team.

These sustainable single-use takeout containers made from wheat husk are fully compostable!

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These days, we’re ordering takeout and a lot of it. Part convenience, part laziness, takeout gives some much-needed variety with the monotony of cooking every meal during the pandemic. With this surge in popularity, Forest & Whale, a multidisciplinary design practice that focuses on products, circular systems, and future envisioning, hope to combat single-use plastic’s harmful impact on the environment with Reuse, a single-use food container that can either be composted in cities with available corresponding facilities or eaten.

Gustavo Maggio and Wendy Chua co-founded Forest & Whale as a means to explore the world of design and its relationship with the environment, along with our own human behavior and living experiences. Made from wheat husk for its base and PHA for the lid, Reuse serves as a fully compostable food container that not only amplifies our experience consuming takeout food but creates a conversation around our high-consumption habits and the negative effect they have on our environment. Wheat husk and PHA, a bacteria-based composite that works like a natural plastic derived from organic materials, can both be composted as food waste, without additional industrial-level composting facilities. The usability of Reuse hinges on its simple decomposition and accessible construction processes, appeals for large cities and small towns alike to adopt this form of containing takeout food. Similar to the paper straw revolution we’ve seen come to fruition almost overnight, the takeout industry could quickly adapt to swapping out their plastic containers for biodegradable and compostable ones like Reuse.

While single-use plastic containers are convenient and quick to get rid of, they leave a startling impact on the environment. Accounting for their low-recyclability rate, plastic takeout containers stick around for ages, running off into waterways and polluting the oceans, spreading toxins to wildlife, releasing harmful chemicals and gases into the air we breathe, and generally disrupting our waste management systems. Maggio and Chua of Forest & Whale designed Reuse to take some of the pressure off our planetary responsibility and health. With hopes of entirely replacing single-use plastic containers with compostable and edible takeout bins, Reuse marks the initial steps towards a worthwhile goal.

Designer: Forest & Whale

Made from wheat husk and PHA, Reuse single-use food containers are fully compostable and edible.

Reuse food containers fully decompose in nature within one to three months, minimizing their end-of-life impact.

Shenzhen’s Maritime Museum is a hub of educational experiences that resemble a cluster of glass icebergs!

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Oh, how I miss museums – those architectural hubs of knowledge that take you through decades-long history lessons, bring you up close to works of art, and introduce you to hidden parts of the world, all in a matter of a couple of hours. Some cities still have the doors of their museums locked to the general public due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but designers are still drawing up plans for the museums of tomorrow. OPEN Architecture recently revealed the visual concept that made them finalists in the International Architecture Design Competition for the Shenzhen Maritime Museum.

OPEN Architecture’s competition entry showcases six glass structures shaped to resemble icebergs stationed in Shenzhen Bay, which house curatorial rooms including the lobby, theater, library, and children’s education wing. Considering today’s global climate crisis, the designers behind the plan for the future Shenzhen Maritime Museum hope to bridge the urgency of climate change with an accessible means of learning more about it. The familiar sight of icebergs will bring the faraway, harsh reality face-to-face with residents of China, igniting awareness of the global rise in sea-levels and oceanic temperatures.

To make the space for the cluster of iceberg-shaped glass structures, OPEN Architecture plans to form a sea dike between two layers of seawalls positioned at different heights, implementing a protective barrier of mangrove wetlands behind it, to also function as a reserve for migrating birds and habitat for marine life. The water surrounding the iceberg structure rises to the horizon, in the style of an infinity pool, to help minimize the impact of seasonal typhoons while also helping to maintain the building’s overall heat load and indoor temperatures.

The Shenzhen Maritime Museum International Architecture Design Competition indicates the beginning of a larger design project, making the Maritime Museum the first of Shenzhen’s ‘ten new major cultural facilities’ currently in the works. The final chosen design will stand as a prominent landmark amidst Shenzhen’s developing coastal region, which aspires to one day become the city’s global maritime center.

Designer: OPEN Architecture

The design’s main event takes place as one of the five ‘icebergs’ drift away into Shenzhen Bay as guests watch an educational video in the iceberg’s theater.

Five icebergs stay stationed in place behind the Maritime Museum’s main iceberg, where events and viewings will be held.

Connecting each individual iceberg are dry pathways for guests to walk through with the waters of Shenzhen Bay surrounding them.

At night, the icebergs light up with brilliant white light to resemble icebergs found in the world’s Arctic region.

Inside each iceberg, guests will find the traditional museum layout familiar and educational.

With mangrove wetlands working as a protective barrier for the museum, they will also provide plenty of space and protection for the area’s natural marine life and bird populations.