Adorable Robochair Can Also Be Wallart
By Emma Chow
This current crowd-funding project from Kickstarter made me smile. While it’s a rather simple piece of multifunctional furniture, the charm is in the aesthetic. An adorable chair with a back shaped like a robot head, it unfolds into a space-saving single layer of 1.5 inches… that looks like an actual robot!
Read more →Kevin Cyr Transforms Shopping Cart Into A Tiny House
By Emma Chow
We’ve been talking a lot about tiny homes lately, but artist Kevin Cyr takes the concept to the extreme. For his latest crowd-funded project, Cyr found a ubiquitous shopping cart and inserted his pop-up camper design to create the Camper Kart. Don’t be fooled by the compact exterior — Cyr has managed to pack storage, table and seating space, as well as lighting inside the space of a shopping cart.
Read more →Magic Boxes: Disappearing Street Art
By Emma Chow
You know the old cliche “stop and smell the roses”. How about “stop and look at the boxes”? If you can find them! American urban hacktivist Cayetano Ferrer is a magician of sorts, transforming ordinary urban objects — usually boxes and signs — into feats of magic. Using stickers printed with high-quality photographs, Ferrer creates an illusion of transparency.
Read more →Pop-Up Pianos: Play Me, I’m Yours
By Emma Chow
Starting in Birmingham, UK back in 2008, then spreading to São Paulo, Sydney, and a myriad of cool cities around the world, funky street pianos have been popping up in conspicuous public spaces, free for anyone to play or spectate. These pianos come from UK artist Luke Jerram‘s ongoing installation ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’. The [...]
Read more →The World Is Your Oyster… Or Fishtank!
By Emma Chow
As we take on the struggles of setting up a fishtank in our office here at The Pop-Up City, this fabulous aquarium concept for Designboom’s TIFF Awards is a timely splash of inspiration. Designed by Takuro Yamamoto Architects, the glass fish basin is a stylized version of a world map that doubles as a coffee table.
Read more →The Decaying Decadence Of Vienna’s New Train Station Proposal
By Emma Chow
For a post-graduate design project students were asked to design a renovation or replacement for Vienna’s existing Westbahnhof train station. What Shahira Hammad offered up is a striking mass of what appears to be decaying foliage.
Read more →DIY Architecture: First WikiHouses Built
By Emma Chow
It was one year ago that we brought you news of WikiHouse, the innovative open-source concept for housebuilding from London-based design team 00:/ (zero zero). The idea is to bring house design and construction to the masses through open-source designs that use easy-to-assemble CNC cutouts from standard sheets of plywood. Anyone can contribute designs, download models (that can generate code for CNC cutting) and assemble the components with minimal training or skill. We’ve already seen IKEA dabble in urbanism. Imagine if they were to offer flat-packaged self-assembly houses — you would probably get something very much like a WikiHouse! Since we’ve last reported on this project, much progress has been made.
Read more →IKEA Introduces Furniture X-Ray Vision
By Emma Chow
Furniture giant IKEA has been trying a lot of new things lately, from urbanism to airport lounges. Now they’re turning your smartphone into x-ray goggles! IKEA is adding a digital layer to their new 2013 catalogue by using Augmented Reality to see into cabinets and dressers, superimpose animated scenes onto pages, and show additional possible furniture configurations.
Read more →Falling House: Why Dorothy Travelled To Oz
By Emma Chow
The Pop-Up City has a penchant for quirky ideas with an element of surprise — they help keep the imagination flowing, prompting us to question the ‘everyday’. Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star really fits the bill: a full-size house precariously hanging off the edge of a 100-feet building in the middle of a university campus in San Diego.
Read more →Find My Friends With A Twist
By Emma Chow
We’ve talked about apps that can help build community or let you remotely explore foreign places with impromptu tour guides. Here’s an application with a more utilitarian function that you may find useful on a daily basis — Twist, an app that combines GPS, Google directions, real-time traffic conditions and a handy notification function. It’s similar to the popular app Find My Friends, which lets you track the GPS location of fellow users. But, Twist gives context to that random smattering of GPS dots with en route information. You can select who gets notified and with what: time of departure, GPS location, expected time of arrival (ETA), etc.
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