Paper Faith: Shigeru Ban’s Cardboard Cathedral
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is well-known for his works with a limited temporal scope: we mentioned in last week’s article on the Snoozebox Hotel that he used shipping containers for disaster relief housing in Miyagi, and he has a considerable portfolio of disaster relief works made of paper products, including houses, schools, churches, and concert […]
Hamburg’s Trashcam Project Converts Dumpsters Into Giant Pinhole Cameras
Thanks to Rudolf from Urban Shit we found out about the Trashcam Project, an extraordinary photography project that recently took place in Hamburg. Some 1,100 garbage containers in the city were converted into pinhole cameras by drilling a hole onto one side of the dumpster so the image is projected onto a giant sheet of photo paper inside. […]
TweetingSeat: The Park Bench That Tweets
Created by Chris McNicholl, a recently graduated product designer at the University of Dundee, the TweetingSeat is an interactive park bench designed to explore the potential for connecting digital and physical communities. Each time someone takes place on the bench, the TweetingSeat takes two photos and uploads these to Twitter. One camera is focused on the bench, […]
Plug + Play: Rethinking Service Stations
Rising fuel prices are forcing car-dependent societies to rethink not only our sense of mobility, but also how we power that mobility. Old gas stations need to be somehow repurposed (like this conversion of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Montréal gas station into a community space), new stations need to be structurally flexible (like this […]
MVRDV + DIY = The New New Urbanism
DIY: still all the rage. Last year, we wrote about DIY land remediation (seriously!), which, at the time, seemed to be an urban intervention that seemed about as antithetical to spontaneous DIY ethics as you could possibly get. Now, thanks to internationally-renowned Dutch architecture firm MVRDV, we can add urban planning to that list of […]
Take Care Of Your Plants With Your iPhone
Some people talk to their plants, but thanks to some nerds, plants can now talk to people. If you pay more attention to your smartphone than to the plants in your apartment, this app is made for you. Koubachi is a recently launched app that enables plants to communicate with their owners through a Wi-Fi sensor. […]
Koloro-Desk: A Flexible Workspace Concept From Tokyo
Over the last years we've showcased plenty of flexible interior and workspace designs, such as this multi-functional furniture by Seung-Yong Song, the Landpeel, Casulo's Room-in-a-Box, and a mobile office concept designed by Liddy Scheffknecht and Armin B. Wagner. Tokyo-based Torafu Architects came up with a new-style workspace concept that's perfectly in line with the trend of pop-up interiors that fit the needs of the 'flexible class'. Part of a bigger series of flexible furniture, their Koloro-Desk is a neatly designed multi-purpose desk that's, yes, very flexible.
They Might Be Giants And The Pink Cardboard Monsterhearse
They Might Be Giants: remember them? “Birdhouse In Your Soul”? C’mon, you don’t remember that unreal music video from 1989? For shame! The cover art for the band’s most recent effort, 2011’s Join Us, features a pink hearse/monster truck hybrid, which is an interesting image in itself. But the band and the cover art’s designer, […]
Open Source Sailing Drone Cleans The Ocean
In 2010, the French/Japanese ecology artist Cesar Minoru Harada initiated the Protei project in an attempt to get rid of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea of the project regards a fleet of sailing drones that clean pollution in open sea water. Using open-source technologies, eight prototypes have already been built. The project was […]
Popped Up: Imagining The Future At Milan Design Week
This year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, or Milan Design Week for those with questionable Italian language skills, just concluded. We couldn’t be there, sadly (we were busy checking out the IABR in Rotterdam), but thankfully the rest of the design community was there to fill our blogrolls with reportage. Here’s a quick Pop-Up City take […]
Reinhard Krug’s Floating Cities
Last week I received an email from Hamburg-based designer and art director Reinhard Krug, who wanted to show us his latest work — an amazing series of limited edition prints of floating cities. “I’m a big fan of large cities and it always fascinates me how they’re little worlds in their own sense”, he explains. This is exactly what Krug’s […]
A Digital Stroll Along The Waterfront
Today in the affordable vacation category, we have Maraya. The interface allows the user walk down digital ‘paths’ comprised of photographs of waterfront developments. Don’t like the path you see? You can create your own and share it with others. Neat! The creators are based out of Vancouver, so a large quantity of the things […]
#IABR — Aqueous Thinking: Art And Collectivity On The Streets Of Douala
Making cities for the future is as much about planning and policymaking as it is about designing and creating: it is a perpetual practice undertaken in boardrooms and bars, conference centres and cafés, by painters and politicians, merchants and managers. Urbane practice in urban areas, though, requires participation and reflection in order to be truly […]
The Google Street View Guide To Street Art
You may have heard about the Google Art Project, a tool that gives people virtual tours through some of the finest and most famous museums in the world. But what about street art, our collective museum in public space? Street art has become a serious art form with artists such as Banksy selling pieces for good money.
Shade Stands: Bottom-Up Urbanism In Kampala
What does innovation look like in cities that are not as developed as most Western cities? Broadening our scope, we're taking a look at great interventions in cities that suffer from problems that are slightly different than those in Amsterdam, London and NYC, such as the Shade Stands project, an impressive bottom-up initiative in Kampala, Uganda.
