Alongside the latest expressions of art. From this perspective, the Air Tree emerges as an experimental prototype of intervention in contemporary urban public space, capable of reactivating sites and creating the conditions to empower the use of the collective space. It is conceived as a technological urban furniture, a self-sufficient climatic comfort generator, that is being used not only as a breathing space but as well interactively.

The Air Tree with its different technical layers supports multiple final configurations and a myriad of intermediate positions (opaque, translucent, transparent, bright, interactive, open, etc.). Its appearance can be transformed over the daily cycle, as well as monthly all through the year. By sensors it is connected in real-time with the climatic conditions of Shanghai, constantly adopting the optimal physical configuration and energy consumption to generate climatic comfort for the citizens.

Air Tree Commons is a recent development of the project. It has been shared through the web (ecosistemaurbano.org/airtreecommons) as an action to open the project to public participation.That means that everyone can freely download, share, remix, redistribute, transform,…using the existing Air tree design as it was built for Shanghai 2010 Expo. It is a powerful way to improve the original design by taking advantage of crowd-sourcing, using the same decentralized model of Open Source Software.

This is part of the exhibition looking through ecosistema urbano eyes, included in the FORMEL_ X architecture series, curated by Kristien Ring.