We love it when furniture can be adapted to different functions, like Catalan designer
Guillem Ferran’s chair ‘Distendido’ that turns into a laundry rack. We also love it when design brings back traditional values and adds innovation to a sometimes-dying craft like the seat collection
Where Memory Used To Sit by the same Spanish designer. ...
Here's an interesting question: If you could cut-and-paste anything into or out of your city, what would it be? In designing the
eco-cities that we have to create in order to survive on this planet, we get to ask this question, and imagine the answers. Chris Luebkeman of
Arup spoke at ETech 2009 about designing an eco-city, and he brings up several design elements we need to examine during planning. Click through for video. ...
Rammed earth is great stuff. The material is literally dirt cheap, formed like concrete but without the use of CO2 producing cement. It has great thermal mass and acoustics- when your wall is up to two feet thick, nothing gets through it.
Martin Rauch is one of the pros- we have shown his
rammed earth fireplaces here. He worked with architect
Roger Boltshauser to build his own rammed earth house....
Perkins & Co. Architects via the Tyee
Designing flexible, affordable housing is a challenge that architects have not often risen to successfully- Apartment designs are usually fixed and people have to move a lot.
That is why the designs recently approved in Burnaby, BC are so intriguing; they are purported to be the first legalized secondary suites within apartments. Designed to provide housing for students, the blue zone can be "locked off" and rented out separately and has its own entrance. It's kind of like a basement apartment in the sky.
The Tyee discusses student housing, but the impact of this kind of thinking goes far beyond that.
...
You know how much we love
vintage, one of the simplest ways of being green (by making use of what's already made). As we've showed before with
Raval Warehouse, if that vintage looks modern and polished, what more can you ask?
These pieces are made by Livin' Pop, a small design firm from Buenos Aires that follows the trend of mixing old with new, but in a sweeter, lighter way than the before mentioned brand. Check more of their pieces in the extended and get inspired to renew your own!...
The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2009 is an
overview of the best and most interesting achievements in design and architecture over the past year. Nominated by industry experts in seven different categories, the public can vote for their favourites.
The
Furniture category is full of delights. We can't resist the Lover's Chair from Spain. Made of recycled paper, it's an iron frame covered with chicken wire and covered with a paste of used paper. It's whimsical, organic, private and public.
...
Photo: Zachary Zavislak
Architectural models are beautiful things, and even in these days of Google Earth and electronic modelling they are still being built and updated. Wired displays a lovely collection of them in an article about
their use in urban planning....
Photo: Flickr, CC
"Leave a 100 Watt light bulb on for a year, pay $100."
Eric Drexler (sometimes called the father of nanotechnology, or more precisely, of
molecular manufacturing) has been blogging for a little while and he recently had a short post with a useful rule of thumb to estimate electricity costs ins the US, and thus encourage conservation.
He wrote:...
Got three pair of jeans that you can't part with? Japanese sofa maker NOyes will turn them into Ottomans. It seems a lot more personal than
turning them into insulation. ...
North American housing is so generic- my first boss said that there are only four house plans in the world and all architects are doing is pushing them around a bit. But sometimes people have different needs, and end up with different answers.
In Tokyo, the wonderfully named
Love Architecture have designed a townhouse project for people who love their motorcycles. And they pack them in; those units don't look more than eight feet wide. We talk often about the need to increase density, but this is pushing the edge of the envelope.
...
images from Design Museum
They are the academy awards of the design industry: the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2009. Covering seven categories: architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport, they are a great opportunity to see what the design world has been up to and where it is going.
The
Products category had lots of interesting candidates. These jar tops are a simple but ingenious way of transforming ordinary empty jars into functional products. The 5 different lids turn jars into a milk jug, sauce jug, sugar shaker, or chocolate shaker.
...
Photography by Roger Wade; see slideshow here
Actually, sod roofs have been used in Scandinavia and Iceland for centuries. However I was surprised to learn that Richard Neutra was doing it in the fifties in Montana. He designed it for Geography professor Nick Helburn, who maintained the cantilevered sod roof with the assistance of a built-in sprinkler system, a lawn mower and a few pet goats....
Composite materials are wonderfully handy -- they can be used in hundreds of applications -- but what about the materials' environmental footprint? Happily, there is a composite material that, when compared to its traditional counterpart, has a much smaller impact, and it can be used for almost anything; I've seen this material being used to construct everything from furniture to parts for cars.
FlexForm Technologies has created a line of natural composite materials with a very attractive set of properties. ...
Here is an idea that builds on the idea of bike-share but takes up a lot less space: Shared electric scooters....
Here is an interesting bit of design that shows a different way of thinking. It is a storage unit, the start of a whole system, from Mexican designer
Christian Vivanco. "From a Lost City" is inspired by the informal architecture of shanty towns....
One day in 1951, Le Corbusier sat down and in 45 minutes designed a summer cottage as a birthday present for his wife. Called Cabanon, it was built beside the sea, near Nice, France, where he ultimately drowned ten years later. Now its actual interior has been painstakingly reconstructed inside a room at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) building.
Inside a room? Yes, because this is a very small and compact cottage. Cabanon means small cabin and also a place where shepherds could rest, so the word has primitive connotations. It is a 15 sq. metre structure whose exterior was a log cabin. It is of interest because it represents a distillation of the architect’s ideas on minimal living. Its interiors are based on a career’s worth of contemplation. Home is where the heart is....
Photo credit: Whigby
Whigby is a firm proponent of "cardpooling," the printing equivalent of
carpooling that commandeers the leftover portions of sheets that are already running through the press for another, unrelated commercial job. "The printer calls us up and let's us know he has a few unused inches of paper at the edge of a sheet," Todd Temporale and Frank Viva, founders of the Toronto-based stationery house, write on their Web site. "Then we scramble to get a design over before the plates are made. Our goal is to see all those empty sheets (and seats) filled to capacity as they pass by on their way to who knows where."
The result? Vibrant illustrated note cards with arresting subjects like a
fedora-donning blue octopus, a
moose-and-octopus pairing caught
en flagrante delicto, and a golden retriever appreciatively breathing in the musk of its feline companion (the tag line reads
"You smell good"). ...
One of four illustrations for the New York Times by"> Sophia Martinek
We have wondered if the attraction of cheap real estate might lead to the revitalization of rust belt cities into greener, more self sufficient communities. Toby Barlow writes in the New York Times about his move to Detroit, (into a famous Miesian townhouse community) but also of others there who are rebuilding a neighbourhood, complete with local farming, solar heating and a mini-community solar electric grid, and more. They started with a house for under two thousand dollars....
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the
if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.