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Bamboo Billboards To Tower Above LA Freeway

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Reimagining The Highway Scenery

Can roadside billboards serve a purpose other than pure advertising?

Imagine floating, globally connected urban forests growing where billboards stand. Stephen Glassman is the artist who sees the potential for these bamboo forests towering above the freeway.

Urban Air is the name of this creative project and with the help of pledges, Glassman hopes to have the billboard forests standing above freeways in Los Angeles sometime in 2014.

From the Kickstarter page*: "Glassman and his team landed the 2011 London International Creativity Award with their Urban Air projection. Since then the Los Angeles based billboard company, Summit Media donated several billboards to serve as a helpful starting point for the project. The artist is continually working with fabricators, engineers and bamboo growers to establish a "kit" which will allow any billboard to be simply switched to a green forest.

Glassman says "Upon a successful launch, it's our plan and intention to transform the steel and wood of outdoor advertising into the infrastructure of urban sustainability in cities around the globe -- actively, publicly, and collectively generating a green global future."

Hoorah for Urban Air!

--Bibi Farber

* Kickstarter Page for Urban Air http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1045021696/urban-air-los-angeles