The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design unveil this year’s GREEN GOOD DESIGN Awards for new product designs, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning by some of the world’s most notable architecture and design practices and key global corporations and manufactures.

The GOOD DESIGN program was founded in Chicago in 1950 by a group of visionary designers and architects, headed by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, as a way in which to market and promote modern design to a reluctant public not eager to embrace the clean lines of modernism or to turn away from traditional taste. The idea was revolutionary and became the opening gun for a new era of modern design and modernist design thinking and a start of mass manufacturing for a mass public.

After 60 years, GOOD DESIGN remains the world’s largest and oldest awards program for the best contemporary design.

In 2009, The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre added a new dimension to the historic annual GOOD DESIGN program by adding a separate edition to the annual awards to promote a greater understanding of the need to develop a global design that was not just “Good” but also “Green.”

“The Green GOOD DESIGN idea,” states Christian K. Narkiewicz-Laine, president of The Chicago Athenaeum and chief curator of the GOOD DESIGN program, “is to challenge designers, architects, developers, contractors, corporations and manufacturers to do a superior job in terms of protecting our environments, encouraging sustainability and recycling, using smart materials, conserving resources, and to better understand the social and political context for objects and buildings destined to be in our ever endangered living and working environments.”

Hence, both American and European institutions call for “Design a Better World Now.”

This year, over 120 new buildings and product designs from 27 nations were awarded for a new design direction for an even greater, more heightened awareness to protect the world’s natural resources and the manufacturing and end-user’s growing concerns for a healthy ecology and human environment. Conserve, reuse, retrofit, and recycle are prominent themes running across each awarded new product and building design.

Green GOOD DESIGN Awards went to architects, designers, manufacturers, developers, corporations, governments, foundations, communities and individuals.

All 2011 Green GOOD DESIGN awards are posted on The European Centre’s website at www.europeanarch.eu.

The deadline for Green GOOD DESIGN 2012 is September 1, 2011.

Submission information and on-line applications are available at The European Centre’s website at www.europeanarch.eu/. For more information, contact Mr. Lary Sommers at lary@chicagoathenaeum.org.