Green ideas ready to bloom

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) September 8, 2006 -- We're familiar by now with Mayor Daley's often-repeated call for Chicago to become the "greenest city in America," but is it really happening? The Windy City remains far behind many others in recycling, and while local architects and builders are increasingly using energy-efficient, eco-friendly materials and technologies, only a handful of large-scale "sustainable" projects have been completed.

That's about to change. For Exhibit A, see "Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress," an exhibit of plans and renderings for seven ecologically progressive projects by Chicago firms, opening Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
The show -- conceived as a companion to the larger exhibit "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design," opening Sept. 16 at the museum -- proves that Chicago's "green" idealism and rhetoric are beginning to translate into concrete results.

"It's a snapshot of some of the innovative architectural work going on here," says the museum's chief curator Elizabeth Smith, who organized the exhibit. "It's also an attempt to show how the city's commitment to sustainability resonates with the ideas about social responsibility and ethical practices that are so much a part of 'Massive Change.' "
Among the featured projects are the Ford Calumet Environmental Center, a multipurpose facility by Jeanne Gang that draws its inspiration from birds' nests. Two other projects focus on public spaces, including a master plan by UrbanLab for west suburban Aurora and a plan by Gensler's Elva Rubio to expand the Hyatt Regency exhibition hall on lower Wacker and bring it into "a closer relationship with the Chicago River."

Then there's a pair of forward-thinking residential projects for homeless or low-income people, designed by Stanley Tigerman and Helmut Jahn, and a new building by Farr Associates in Humboldt Park that uses geothermal heating and cooling systems, solar panels, a green roof and power provided by vertical-axis wind turbines in the surrounding "eco-industrial" park.


Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by KEVIN NANCE

Chicago     eco-friendly materials     mayor daley     museum of contemporary art     progressive projects     windy city