Good for you, Madrid. Everyone in the city was required to park their cars for the day and get to work, school, shopping or otherwise by some other means. In Central Madrid the idea was to promote a green lifestyle.

Dads with babies, dads pulling babies, dads pulling babies while doing business or checking in with mom on their cell phones, dads pulling babies with their recumbents, and, um, okay, where are the moms in these pictures?

What GP wants to know is why doesn’t Madrid and Paris and Berlin and Beijing and Tokyo, and Moscow (too cold?) and New York City and and all the major cities and minor ones, too, have car-free days? If it can be done once, why can’t it be done regularly? Huh? Huh?

Nice try, Madrid. But, what I want to know, is what will tomorrow be like?

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photo by vr2006

With 1.8 million cars counting for 75-percent of the air pollution, Madrid is one of Spain’s most polluted cities. Recently the City Hall announced that their official vehicles will “turn green” by 2011 using clean fuels like bio-diesel, ethanol, natural gas or even running on electricity. Madrid also joined the BEST (BioEthanol for Sustainable Transport) European project to promote the use of ethanol in cars and is going to make agreements with taxi companies to offer them road tax discounts if they will turn green, too.

Such decisions could make people realize that something has to be done if we want a cleaner air. We can start with our cars.

via AutoBlogGreen

photo by juanpg

The newest museum in Madrid, CaixaForum, got a vertical garden on one of the exterior walls. Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & Meuron, there are 15,000 plants from more than 250 different species that are now covering a 1899 converted former power station.

They managed to get a “very unusual encounter between the rough and the natural” with a high contrast between the restored building that has a rusted iron top and the beautiful green plants.

photo by Funksturm

CaixaForum is a sociocultural center was inaugurated in the very heart of Madrid on February 2008 and serves as museum, auditorium, art gallery and bookshop.

The creator of the vertical garden is Patrick Blanc, already known for its work in France (the Quai Branley Office Wing) is expected to install the next one in China or probably in the UK. Actually he said that such gardens could be created anywhere, even in “those difficult spaces where you don’t expect to see greenery”. His experience comes from studying rainforests and you can see the results. – via – TreeHugger