Urban Hacktivist Launches Pigeon Trap
Remember these guerrilla crosswalks in Strasbourg we showcased last week? The website of urban hacktivist Florian Rivière is full of nice little interventions in public space. The artist’s simple yet hilarious pigeon trap shows he has a great sense of humor. Ingredients: a delicious French ‘baguette de pain’ and a crate. Result: big fun.
City Of Bubbles
Cloud Cities is an exhibition that ran until 15 January at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. The exhibition offered an unusual vision on architecture, ecology and the way we experience life in general. Cloud Cities consisted of giant bubbles and exotic plants suspended on a structure reassembling a giant spider web. According to the man behind the artwork, Tomás Saraceno, […]
When Bicycle Culture Meets Graphic Design
De Fietsfabriek means The Bike factory in English. It’s a bicycle company from our home town Amsterdam that manufactures and sells hand-built quality bikes. Over the last years we’ve seen Fietsfabriek stores popping up in cities like Berlin, New York, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Copenhagen-based design student Kristoffer Hvitfeldt created a brand-new visual identity for the […]
Living With Urban Drones
In the last months, we lived through DARPA engaging MAKE Magazine and Otherlab to teach high school students how to “build robots, drones and other low- and medium-tech gadgets” and DARPA Director Regina Dugan (see this video about her work at DARPA) deciding to move to Google. Meanwhile the National Security Agency, USA, resurrected a […]
Guerrilla Gardening With Illuminating Herbs
Back in 2010 we wrote an article about the green shining pharmacy crosses you find everywhere in South European cities. The guys of Madrid-based Luzinterruptus have made yet another brilliant ambient artwork criticizing this phenomenon. Their work Pharmacy Herbs is a series of three temporary artificial micro parks consisting of fluorescent sticks. At three downtown locations in […]
Tape And Tape: A Cocoon Fit For A Church
Numen/For Use are at it again. This certainly isn’t the first time that they’ve created a cocoon out of adhesive tape. But while Tape Melbourne was a project that filled an outdoor public space, Tuft Pula is a little more reserved. Currently installed in a former church in Pula, Croatia, the cocoon dangles almost precariously […]
World’s First Virtual Supermarket Opens In Seoul
Remember that subway platform supermarket in South Korea? Tesco and Samsung are taking this idea to the next level with their virtual HomePlus grocery store that opened its doors in Seoul two days ago.
Jeff Koons Brings Back Train to New York’s High Line
Plans are made for a 2.4 kilometers extension of New York's High Line. Designers are studying scenarios for the 10th Avenue Spur, with the objective to make it one of the major gathering spaces at the park. The design will possibly include a wicked art installation by Jeff Koons called 'Train', featuring a full-size replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive suspended from a crane above the park.
Adverpainting: Living In A Business Model
Remember Adzookie, that service that helps people with mortgages they can’t afford any more? Adzookie transforms your house into one big advertisement. In exchange the advertiser pays your killing mortgage. This enables people that got into trouble as a consequence of the financial crisis to stay in their houses. The house will be painted back to its original colors as soon as the deal ends.
Spacehive: A Crowd-Funding Platform For Urban Initiatives
As we said before, crowd-funded urbanism is trending in 2012. More urban crowd-funding initiatives pop up. Only last December Spacehive was launched in the UK, a crowd-funding platform focused on 'neighborhood improvement projects'. Spacehive says to provide "a quick and democratic way" to fund a project.
Urban Hacktivist Launches Guerrilla Crosswalks
Urban hacktivist Florian Rivière came up with this guerrilla crosswalk in his home town Strasbourg. Made from old carpet, the light-weight pop-up crosswalks are easy to carry and can be placed on the street "so you can cross wherever pleases you".
Old Places, Historical Traces: Ghost Hunt In Augmented Reality
The basic idea ‘every place has a story to tell’ has given grounds to many manifestations — in quite a figurative and literal sense. We have seen the pictures, know the books and on-site there you can feel a presence sometimes. Historical places can give us a thrill just by being there. However, media technologies […]
Kitchain: Modular Furniture For Social Dining In Public Space
Food-related events have become extremely popular in our cities over the last years. Why? Because social dining brings us together. We share our habits, culture and ideas while sitting at the same table. Bernedetta Maxia and António Louro of Lisbon-based art and architecture collective MOOV came up with Kitchain. Originally designed and built for the Belluard Bollwerk International festival, […]
A Fragile Shelter In The Woods Of Hokkaido
Small cabins in the middle of nowhere gain popularity. Not only to semi-permanently live in, or as a part of a decentralized hotel, but also as event spaces. The Japanese architecture firm Hidemi Nishida Studio has created this so-called Fragile Shelter, a temporary construction in the Sapporo Art Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Hidemi Nishida Studio is specialized in feather-light constructions with plastic as a main construction material. Great examples are this Fragile Shelter but also their piece of inflatable architecture called Occupied.
Thirsty Yemen Drinks Water From Rooftops
Today’s World Water Day — a nice occasion to highlight the great R.A.I.N.S. project that has just kicked off in Yemen’s capital Sana’a. Initiated by Sana’a resident Sabrina Faber, the program provides an innovative solution for water shortage by modifying existing rooftop structures in the city to capture, filter and store rain water. R.A.I.N.S., which stands for Rainwater […]
