Winter/Spring 2010
In This Issue:
Gimme Shelter
As cities around the globe move to up their environmental bona fides, eco-friendly design is starting to crop up in the most unlikely of places. One current trend sees cities constructing bus shelters that combine sustainable materials, energy efficient features, and innovative design. With these unique urban oases, public transportation advocates are making waiting for the bus just as much of a statement as taking the bus.
To raise awareness about the importance of environmentally-friendly roofing, British community group Groundwork Sheffield created living roofs for bus shelters around town. The green-roof shelters were created by overlaying sedum vegetation mats on top of existing bus shelters, which gave the shelters an eye-catching, somewhat whimsical look The green-roof shelters don’t just raise consciousness about sustainable building techniques, they also serve a useful function: the living mats absorb pollution from bus exhausts and help reduce rainwater runoff.
Back in the States, Lexington, Kentucky-based architect Aaron Scales won the national Art in Motion design competition with his Bottlestop bus shelter. The walls of the shelter are composed of recycled glass soda bottles mounted between panes of safety glass. Scattered throughout the shelter are bottles that have been hand-etched with designs by Scales. During the day, roof-mounted solar panels collect energy that power LED lights, giving the shelter an otherworldly glow at night. Although the shelter is currently a one-of-a-kind piece, Scales designed it to be easily replicated and customizable to different kinds of bottles.
 Bus shelter with a green roof in Sheffield, England. After a one-month trial period met with good results, the city expanded the project to two years. The shelters are maintained by staff and volunteers for Groundwork Sheffield, the organization that created the roofs. Artist's rendering of a San Francisco bus shelter composed of 75% recyclable materials.The roofs are made of photovoltaic cells which power the shelter's electronic components. Excess power generated by the solar cells is returned to the city's electricity grid.When it comes to progressive urban design, however, few cities can match San Francisco. In 2008, the city announced plans to add 1,100 eco-friendly bus shelters to city streets by 2013. Created by Lundberg Design, the shelters’ structures are composed of 75% recyclable materials. The roofs of the structures are made of photovoltaic cells, which are used to power electronic information kiosks, LED lighting, and built-in WiFi routers. On top of being 100% self-sufficient, the cells generate excess energy which is then funneled back into the city’s power grid.
Once all the shelters are in place, they’ll be doing a lot more than just keeping commuters safe from the rain. For years, San Francisco has been experimenting with ways to blanket the city with free, wireless Internet access. The WiFi routers in the shelters will help the city finally achieve their goals, by making each bus shelter a node in the vast wireless grid.
Hector Canteros Teaches More Than Chess
When chess teacher Hector Maximo Canteros needed some universal games to keep his Buenos Aires elementary school students occupied during recess, he came up with a novel solution. “I had no money to buy new games, so I resorted to recycling,” he wrote in an e-mail.
 Hector Canteros' students in Buenos Aires learn about the environment while playing games they make from bottlecaps and other discarded objects.The program, started in 2001, requires students to search their homes and neighborhoods for discarded plastic packaging and bottles, aluminum cans, corks, used printer ink cartridges, newspapers and magazines, cardboard, light wood, fabrics and leather, packing peanuts, subway tickets — no glass or metal that could be dangerous. They clean the items up before they bring them to class and then learn how to play a game based on what they’ve found. Student have played backgammon with yogurt lids, Parcheesi with pop bottle tops and chess with various-sized bottles.
As the children play the games, Canteros discusses the environmental issues surrounding the materials they found. “The work began as a project of games but has transformed into a playful program of ecology,” he explained.
Canteros, who has won numerous awards in Argentina for his creative educational methods, teaches what he calls Drap Games — for the Drap-Art movement that promotes creative recycling as a tool of transformation in the arts, the environment and society — in three local schools, and conducts workshops on recycled games at community events, juvenile detention centers, neighborhood health clinics, retirement homes and homeless shelters, He is working with the Argentine Ministry of Culture to broaden the program to encompass recreation programs for at-risk teens and neighborhood centers serving the poorest people in the city.
Canteros is the author of several books about games, and has posted 30 “indispensable” games from around the world, old and modern, on his blog, Ludoskopio: A Look at the World of Games, with rules and instructions on how to make them.
Haunting "Ghost Forest"
On November 16, 2009, people passing through London's Trafalgar Square, one of the world's most visited tourist sites, were confronted by a sprawling collection of 10 gigantic rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, called the Ghost Forest. This mammoth exhibit, which took 12 hours to set up, is an art project designed by artist Angela Palmer to raise public awareness of threatened rainforests throughout the world. "I wanted to bring home to people the stark reality of the destruction," she wrote. "I thought a tree stump would be like seeing a rhino without its horn. Also I wanted the missing trunk -- the negative space -- to represent the absence of the world's lungs. "
The Ghost Forest tree stumps come from a regulated, commercially-logged tropical rainforest in Ghana, a country which has lost 90% of its primary rainforest over the past 50 years. Most of the tree stumps fell naturally in bad weather conditions. Today, Ghana has strict regulations for sustainable and responsible forestry; it became the first country in Africa to partner with the European Union to outlaw illegal logging. "The installation carries a message of hope and optimism," Albert said.
After leaving England on November 22, the Ghost Forest traveled to Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference. The trees were displayed in Thorvaldsens Plads, a city center square next to Parliament Square. Off-cut roots from the exhibit's large Denya tree were placed in glass globes and presented as Earth Journalism awards during the Conference.
The Ghost Forest, which is a carbon neutral project, has now returned to England for storage while future tours are being planned. The project’s carbon footprint will be offset by ClimateCare, an organization that supplies the people of Ghana with efficient cook stoves.
From Underground Transport to Rooftop Studios
Artists are always in need of studio space, but finding something affordable in a city like London can be a pricey proposition. Auro Foxcroft decided to use his skills and training as a furniture designer to create affordable space for creative professionals.
 Creative Spaces — What was once a subway car is transformed into workspace for rent on top of a reclaimed Victorian warehouse in LondonPhoto courtesy of Village Underground.“Office space in London is fantastically expensive, so I set out to make my own,” he said. “I bought six tube cars that the London Underground had taken out of service for £100 (about US$200 in 2006). They were happy to have me take them off their hands, and I saved them from going to the scrapyard.”
Once Foxcroft got all the recycled carriages in one place, he decided four were in good enough shape to be converted to offices. Two he sold for parts and materials, which financed the renovation of the others.
Then came the question of where to put them. His brother Jack had been working on a project called Village Underground, which restored an enormous Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch into an art exhibition/performance/event venue. Auro decided his affordable studios would help attract creative types to the expansive raw space, and, with the help of an architect friend, began devising a way to install the cars — on the warehouse roof. “It cost me another £12,000 (about US$24.000) for the crane and the staff to get the cars up there,” Foxcroft said.
The crew removed the wheels and heavy machinery from the cars before lifting them up two stories and positioning them on shipping containers, also reclaimed from freight companies planning to discard them. Once everything was properly installed, Foxcroft spent about nine months stripping the floors and finishing the interiors, which he divided into 12- to 15-foot spaces he calls desks, then started taking on tenants in 2007. He left the original exterior graffiti intact.
Each of the 36 desks rents for about $60 per week, an excellent price compared to other London real estate. Some of the 50 tenants, such as a theatre company and music video producer, are permanent, but there are a lot of freelancers hot-desking — dropping in for a day or two at a time — and sharing space with others. According to Foxcroft, they include everything from fashion designers to working musicians as well as graphic artists and writers.
The rooftop studios are as much about creative collaboration as the ethos of recycling and reuse of materials. With artists from a variety of disciplines sharing the space, interesting conversations are bound to arise, and cross-cultural exchange is what Village Underground is all about.
 Higher Repurpose — Recycled London tube carriages have been converted into rooftop artists’ studios and office spaces as part of the Village Underground project.Photo courtesy of Village Underground.“We focused on the creative community, and people were really interested,” Foxcroft said. “The desks filled up quickly and we have a long waiting list.” The idea has taken off so well, in fact, that Foxcroft has two more projects in the works — the one in Berlin is “part-way through,” he said this January, and he is in negotiations for a location in Lisbon, Portugal, as well as for another building in London.
The cars were not the only part of the project rescued from the landfill. The translucent Rodeca paneling, a 6-wall polycarbonate façade that insulates while letting in light, was obtained from the manufacturer’s end-of-the-run scraps. The paths and furniture came from railway sleepers, and “the stairs and sinks and many bits and pieces” were also recycled, according to Foxcroft, who also said the paints used came from a certified green company in the UK.
And the project continues to expand its eco-friendly footprint. “We’ve a new green roof on which we are growing a meadow and some veg, and we have a PV solar array that powers the day-to-day needs of the studios,” he explained. “In the winter we have 100 percent green energy top-up to power the electric heating.”
The studios are a not-for-profit venture — as is the entire Village Underground project — dedicated to bringing the creative community together for collaboration and cross-cultural exchange. As the network of facilities expands, Village Underground is envisioned as an international platform for a vibrant interaction of art, culture and creativity.
Join Us on Facebook
As a fellow art eco fan, we invite you to join us on the Eco-Artware.com Fan Page on Facebook, too. In addition to more discussions about art eco, recycling, crafts, and eco-entertaining, we have created a growing international calendar of eco-art shows. If you have information about a performance or show with an eco-theme -- using recycled or natural materials, for example, or aimed at raising awareness of the issues --please share the URL to an official site on our wall and we'll include it in our listing for everyone to share. Please join the discussion and our community.
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