The Sears Tower in Chicago is about to undergo a $350 million-dollar retrofit that will add wind turbines to its 110th floor roof and upgrades to windows, lighting and cooling systems. It’s estimated that the retrofit will reduce the building’s electricity demand by 80%. And for a 4.5 million square foot building, that’s a big deal– estimated to be equal to 150,000 barrels of oil a year. Read more details on the renovation on the Sears Tower site.

Check out this collection of Barack Obama during his freshman year at Occidental College. The photos were taken in 1980 by then photography student Lisa Jack and they are now on exhibit at the M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. Read more about Jack’s photos.

Banksy has installed more than 100 works at Bristol’s City Museum.

Here’s an incredibly large set of vintage matchbook covers.

I wanted to see if it would be fun to make a horror movie. My uncle sent me a book called $30 Film School. It taught me how to do lighting and how you set up the camera. I typed the script in red to make it scary. That’s how nine year-old filmmaker Emma Kenney describes how she started to make her movie, The New Girl in Town, which debuted last week at the New Jersey International Film Festival. Read more.

It’s Virginia the Tamale Lady’s birthday on Monday. Many will celebrate at Zeitgeist.

Missouri high school student, Aimee Kick, made her prom dress out of coffee filters. She spent about a month on the entire project; folding and cutting as well as staining, dying, sewing, and hand blow-drying the coffee filters.

Tokyo designer Shunsuke Umiyama has created AC Adapter Midori, a mobile phone charger that looks like a vine.

The Uniqlo Calendar is mesmerizing.

My Walk to Wieden + Kennedy from James Okubo.

This week David Lynch launched Interview Project, where he goes on a 70-day, 20,000-mile road trip interviewing random people. New ones are added every 3 days.

You’d be surprised how beautiful Japanese manhole covers can be.

I’ve been checking out the exceptional web content of Good magazine more and more lately. And the thing that always pulls me in first is the terrific infographics, they’re usually creative, interesting and fun to look at. Now you can see the entire collection in a Flickr set that gets new updates each Tuesday. The L.A.-based magazine was founded two and a half years ago by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the late founder of Inc. magazine, Bernie Goldhirsh, and it donates its subscription fees entirely to charity.

Sunset at the end of the road on Google Streetview.

We use to think the future was going to be a lot pointy-er than it actually turned out to be. Check out this ample collection of futuristic styles of cars from the late ’70s and early ’80s.

Yesterday a stretch of Broadway around Times Square between 42nd and 47th Streets and another near Herald Square between 33rd and 35th Streets was closed to automotive traffic and more than 3 acres of new open space was added to the heart of Manhattan. Officially, a $1.5 million pilot project that will be evaluated throughout 2009 for a final approval, the Green Light for Midtown project has turned Broadway into a pedestrian mall that will soon be dotted with cafe tables, slacking smokers, tourists with rollybags and Chinese delivery guys on bikes. While Mayor Bloomberg might get all the glory (or grief) for this and other bike- and pedestrian-friendly civic plans (180 miles of bike lanes have been added in New York since 2006), it turns out that the bold genius behind turning Broadway into the newest park in New York is Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation Commissioner since 2007. Oddly, closing Broadway, and removing its diagonal slice through the Manhattan grid, is going to have a beneficial effect on auto traffic through Midtown. With no more 3-way intersections at 34th and 42nd Streets, Midtown traffic models predict a 37% improvement in travel times for cars traveling north on 6th Ave. and a 17% improvement to travel times when traveling downtown on 7th Ave. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff sized up the first day without cars down Broadway this way:

Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor could never get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in the middle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room, the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.

See photos of the day Broadway was given back to pedestrians.

The Netherlands doesn’t have enough criminals. The Dutch justice ministry announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in their prison system because of the declining crime rate in the country.

Spend some time exploring the amazing map of the Mannahatta Project. If you zoom in and click around, you can explore every damn block on the island of Manhattan and see what was there before 1609. After nearly ten years of research, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, working through the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, has used old maps and modern spatial analysis techniques to map every hill, valley, stream, spring, beach, forest, cave, wetland, and pond that existed on the island of Mannahatta. It also lists all possible animals, humans, and plants that could have been in there– on every damn block! The project claims the GIS database for the project is the most complete description of a landscape ever attempted. This year marks the 400th anniversary of of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Bay and other coinciding history goodness includes the exhibit Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City, at the Museum of the City of New York and the publication of Sanderson’s book, Mannahatta: Natural History of New York City.

Dutch artist Ron van der Ende makes really amazing wood relief sculptures inspired by photographs and reproductions he finds. Read his blog here (if you read Dutch) or just want to look at the pictures. Read an interview with van der Ende.