It's not easy going green, but it can spark creativity

For many Toronto homeowners, I suspect, the prospect of going green can summon up daunting visions.

One thinks of costly conversions to geo-thermal heating and cooling, extensive insulation upgrades, major alterations in lifestyle and such, all designed to reduce the carbon footprints that our houses and apartments, and ourselves, stamp on the environment.

There's certainly nothing wrong with any of these moves. Indeed, it seems clear to just about everybody nowadays that the ways buildings are constructed, and the ways we inhabit our homes and cities, must become ever more green-conscious if the earth is to be liveable a hundred years from now.

Now, having made this weighty (and, to most people, obvious) point, I want to talk about the more playful, and less widely celebrated, dimensions of being green. Artists, architects, designers and other creative folk around the world have been learning a lot from the popular mindfulness about ecology and nature. And as they've learned, many of them have been pushing their practices beyond the utilitarian plane at which too much green thinking is stuck, and creating products that embody a very fresh contemporary aesthetic of greenness.

The evidence for what I am talking about has been usefully packaged in the new portfolio from Gestalten called My Green City: Back to Nature with Attitude and Style (242 pages, $42.90). Edited by Sven Ehmann, Kitty Bolhöfer and Gestalten publisher Robert Klanten, this book showcases colourful sculptures and performances, window gardens and urban beehives, garden tools and rooftop gardens, moss walls, high-rise farms and numerous other interesting objects fashioned under green influence by 161 individuals or studios.

Among the loveliest projects illustrated here are the vertical gardens raised in Madrid and Paris by French botanist Patrick Blanc. These aren't your ordinary walls blanketed by Boston ivy. Putting to work his knowledge of both architectural technology and growing, Mr. Blanc has engineered a system of plastic panels sheathed in felt that gives sturdy support to lush, abounding cascades of vines and other plants. The exuberance of these exterior walls stands at one end of the emotional spectrum charted in this book. At the other limit – on the cool, contemplative end, that is – one finds the serene sculptural bundles and back-to-the-land personal adornments made of dried wheat stalks by Studio Toogood, a UK-based design collective.

But as the reader quickly finds by browsing through this volume, Mr. Klanten and his colleagues at Gestalten have a definite preference for works with drama and a sense of fun. They like, for example, the Italian design firm Arabeschi di Latte, which, in 2008, got carried away by the vogue for recycling and staged a lavish banquet where everything was fully compostable. And I do mean everything: tableware, décor, even the cardboard dining table. At the end of the performance, the whole kit and caboodle was sent off to a farm for use as fertilizer. (Until I saw this, I thought I was a pretty good recycler. No more.)

The buildings featured here tend to be similarly flamboyant and off the map, but they occasionally deliver a surprising intellectual punch.

Take, for instance, the 45-storey structure called Plug Out, proposed by New York's WORK Architectural Company in response to a recent call for ideas about what to do with a neglected part of lower Manhattan. Instead of being tidily stacked one on top of another, in the manner of ordinary high-rises, the various rectangular levels of Plug Out rotate laterally from a vertical hinge. A couple of these multi-storey slabs swing out over West Street, a 10-lane highway running alongside the Hudson River.

Plug Out's striking, highly unusual form exploits the hitherto unusable corridor of light and air opened in the dense street grid by West Street. But the inventive habitation of wasted big-city space is not the only green aspect of this mixed-use (unbuilt) skyscraper. It has been hard-wired to perform as an immense therapeutic machine offering what the authors call "urban dialysis: filtering and cleaning water and providing energy, which is then fed back into the surrounding district."

Of the really-built architectural efforts presented here, none is more thoughtful than the garden of the Native Child and Family Services facility, located atop an office tower in downtown Toronto. This little open-air ensemble of flower patches, a healing lodge and fire circle, handsomely crafted by Levitt Goodman Architects, was intended to be "a place that would reconnect urban aboriginals with nature in the heart of the city…" If photographs are to be believed, this beautiful refuge may well meet that welcome objective.

Levitt Goodman's garden, of course, is serious art. Many other treatments in My Green City are light-hearted. If you are looking for an inspirational and entertaining picturebook about the often solemn topic of being green, this album is for you.