July 15, 2010

Dear _________________________,

I have been hard at work researching ideas for the artwork for you.  Last week I was in the library and came across the Playbill to the popular Broadway musical of a few years back, “Greenhorn”.  I know you (most especially  ____________ ) remember this one—maybe you even saw it when it came through Seattle and was at the 5^th Avenue ?  It seemed almost too perfect a theme for the tapestry…true story musical about the brilliant young architect Stanley Greenhorn who pretty much saved the earth from CO₂ buildup in the atmosphere in 2035.  See! musical ( _____________), architect ( ________________ )!! 

Here is the cover:

Of course there is a wealth of information about this guy.  Most kids have to learn about him in school these days.  And some of the songs were and are still quite popular—“Stucco’s Gotta Go,” and “Living Sub Lime.”

The Museum of History and Industry was nice enough to print me a copy of a photograph of Greenhorn’s desk showing a pencil drawing he had been working on.  The drawing seems to have been finished during the formative stages of his design work and shows his historical perspective and thought patterns.  Notice the shapes to the upper right which eventually were used by him in creating his photo-synthetic biostructures.

The concept of biostructure had been toyed with in the last century, but was limited to planting on the outside of buildings or walls.  Greenhorn teamed up with Skippy Jorgensonne and Adele Miller at Genomixs to engineer the totally alive framework we live, work and play in now.Besides imagining the cyano-bacterial core concept Greenhorn also perfected the flowing shapes which maximized sunlight exposure and thus CO₂ uptake.   Later when the team genetically modified the bacteria any color instead of the natural brown/green/blue hues of the organisms could be used.  Here are some early examples of those shapes: