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San Francisco designer, Joanna Borek-Clement has created an innovative architectural urban design that could alleviate pollution and overcrowded streets. Sky-Terra is a structural system based on the concept of adding a new and eco-friendly level to major cities, adding new public spaces to already crowded cities.

Although skyscrapers might be beautiful, complaints have come from some of them ruining the horizon, by sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of a vast wilderness. Look around any large metropolis and you will note the same things: no room for expansion, pollution, crowded city streets, a vast array of buildings that take away sunlight from the avenues below. They cast an ominous, eerie shade on the city below, taking away the suns warmth, and replacing it with the shades chillier temperature. The need for public spaces is crucial in any busting metropolis.

Joanna Borek-Clement is a designer from San Francisco who has envisioned a new way of constructing high-rises using a new architectural design. Her design is inspired by the shape of a neuron cell, and would allow the streets below to be filled with parks, and recreational community buildings. Her idea shows buildings sprouting up from the ground, and branching out wider towards the sky, sort of like building an alternate layer far away from the ground. These interconnected towers would also be built of mass-produced materials that would allow for the conservation of critical energy and precious resources.

I like this project: it makes a lot of sense for the environment and for bettering the general life of city dwellers. I find that its practicality could lead the project to materialize into something concrete within the next several years. A new, intricate layer in the sky could better the quality of life for the ones who seek to stay below it.

More Info.:

• http://joannaborek.com/index_welcome.html

Carolina Pino, a student at NYU, has created what she calls Shellhouse Living Portable. They are traceable, portable shelters for the homeless. She created it to allow even those less fortunate to network with the world.

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Carton is a symbol of consumerism: a material that highlights the contradictions of the capitalistic world, divided by abundance and misery. It can contain food or objects of any type, and it can be thrown away and be recycled later on. The first carton boxes in history dated back to 1817, the year in which England used this material for commercial shipping. From that point on, carton has been present in our daily lives, sometimes being almost invisible.

But this time, it has been used as the main protagonist in the artwork of a young Chilean designer, a brilliant NYU student Carolina Pino – an artist splitting her time between Santiago, Chile, and New York. Her project is named “Shellhouse Living Portable.”

Carolina explains that her carton shelters for the homeless are the creation of a project that tried to capture something extremely economic by using technology: apparently something that hasn’t been explored, until now. The carton house is equipped with a circuit that transmits radio signals and transforms a simple box into a traceable internet device. Through the internet connection, the “shellhouse” is visible online and traceable inside of the city while navigating on google maps.

An inspired effort to aid the less fortunate of our community, this project can show new possibility towards the control and prevention of homelessness, while also helping those who live in the streets of our cities, and assuring them that they are not forgotten. Bravo, Carolina!

More Info.:

• http://carolinapino.net/
• http://www.shellhouse.org/