by: Lisa Delgado
Exhibition: FEEDBACK
Location: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st Street, through 04.19.08
(left) Fluxxlab’s Revolution Door uses manpower to generate energy for an LED sign; (right) The Power Cart by Mouna Andraos and Fluxxlab, among others, provides power to recharge electronic devices via a hand crank and solar panel.
Courtesy Eyebeam
In the future, perhaps sick buildings will automatically vent stale air by opening slits in their façades, recycling will be universal, and dead cell phones and laptops will be easily recharged with a few twists of a hand crank. These are just a few of the eco-friendly measures being conceived by architects, artists, and engineers featured in FEEDBACK, an exhibition at Eyebeam in Chelsea through this Saturday.
Visitors enter through a revolving door designed by Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin, who formed the design firm Fluxxlab to work on experimental sustainable projects together. Titled Revolution Door: Power for People by People (2007), the door recycles the energy used to push it to light up an LED sign. Fluxxlab also contributed the show’s exhibition design, which includes artificial turf covering a central “green,” evoking the ambiguous nature of some environments. Recycled artificial grass was a more eco-sensitive option than real grass would have been, said Broutin, who led one of FEEDBACK’s many accompanying workshops on the turf one recent Saturday.
Around the common green lie displays of about 20 projects at various phases of development. Designed by Mouna Andraos with help from Broutin, Trudell, and others, The Power Cart (2007) is a recycled-wood contraption designed to wheel around city streets, providing power to recharge cell phones or other devices via a hand crank and solar panel. On the side is a shelf for wine bottles, so the eco-conscious may have a drink while they wait for their gadgets to charge.
Systems for monitoring air pollution and other toxins abound. One highlight is Living City (2008) by architectural designers David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of The Living. The latest phase of this project involves networking buildings in NYC and San Francisco to share air-quality data gleaned by sensors. In response to the air quality readings, a prototype building façade at the SF art center Southern Exposure “breathes” by opening and closing gill-like slits (viewable at Eyebeam through live video). Eyebeam visitors can also see (but, alas, not ride) a prototype of the wooden bike that Rogers Marvel Architects and West 8 designed for Governors Island.
A few projects may leave visitors scratching their heads, such as Annina Rüst’s eRiceCooker (2006), which tracks references to genetically modified rice on Internet news sites and automatically cooks rice in response, creating an excess of food that seems counterintuitive. Overall, though, FEEDBACK serves as a roadmap of promising routes being developed toward a more sustainable future.
Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.