Bye Bye Concrete, Hello Plastic
Whereas the modernists were lyrical about the possibilities of using concrete as a new material for buildings, back in 1920, I now feel a comparable enthusiasm for sustainable plastic. Affresol, a Welsh company, has designed what could be the ‘house of the future’. The firm developed a material called Thermo Poly Rock (TPR) from recycled […]
Temporary Bar Made From IKEA Storage Boxes
Dezeen reports about the semi-translucent bar that designers Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto have built for a competition of the Universidade do Porto in Portugal. The 4.7 meter high bar consists of 420 IKEA storage boxes fixed on a metal frame. At night the boxes are illuminated by LED lights inside responding to the music […]
Floating Eden
Will the first Dutch hills be on water? Dutch architect Anne Holtrop collaborated with green technology firm Studio Noach and botanist and vertical garden guru Patrick Blanc to design an artificial floating island containing gardens and a spa. The floating gardens project was proposed for Amsterdam’s youngest neighborhood IJburg. According to Dezeen it should contain […]
Moving House By Double Bike
Currently Copenhagen seems to take over the position of world cycling capital from Amsterdam, considering the bicycle culture blog Copenhagenize and the amazing Copenhagen Wheel. Nevertheless, the Dutch come up with an innovation — the cargo bike. For two years Onno Sminia and Louis Pierre Geerinckx, two students at the Technical University of Delft, have […]
Metropolis: A Movie By Rob Carter
Rob Carter has designed a brilliant stop motion animation in which he compresses about 70 years of a city’s development into 3 minutes and 12 seconds. Within the time-lapse video he physically manipulates aerial still images of the city of Charlotte, North Carolina (both real and fictional). Arkinet explains that the video which is entirely […]
Build Your Own Google Street View Car
How would it be to drive in the Google Street View car? The designers of F.A.T. built a fake Google Street View car and successfully provoked the activistic inhabitants of Berlin while driving around. The critique on Google increases. While Google was considered to be the most sympathetic and innovative company of last decade, currently […]
A Floating Modular Park For Amsterdam
Last Friday I had an interesting talk with landscape designer Ronald Rietveld about temporary urbanism and flexible strategies for the city of Amsterdam. He revealed a great design proposal for the renewed harbor area in the East of Amsterdam. The project New Amsterdam Park (N A P), that Rietveld Landscape designed in collaboration with Atelier […]
Pachube And The Internet Of Things
Not so long ago, the Internet of Things sounded like something very abstract. The term ‘Internet of Things’ represents a world in which more and more objects and devices in daily life are connected through minuscule identifiying devices which make use of, for instance, RFID technology. Think of energy monitoring. In his book ‘The Internet […]
Hong Kong Outside
Hong Kong Outside is the book that comes with its counter part Hong Kong Inside — the book we reviewed on Friday. Both books are photographic collections made by Michael Wolf and published in a beautiful cassette by Peperoni Books. Hong Kong Outside is about the facade of a city that develops in a incredible pace on a small piece of land.
Hong Kong Inside
“A single image doesn’t tell you much, but seen as a collection, a pattern emerges to form a meaningful narrative.” This is the first sentence of the beautiful book ‘Hong Kong Inside’ by Michael Wolf. We can’t show all the images here, and I think Mr. Wolf won’t allow us to, after spending fourteen years […]
Pixels And Places
“Actually we know nothing about video art in public space.” That’s how art historian Catrien Schreuder introduces her book ‘Pixels and Places’ during the book presentation at Tent in Rotterdam. Video art in general is hardly investigated, although the discipline itself is already 40 years old. It’s time for a critical perspective, an interpretation that […]
Subway Bathroom
Our highly appreciated reporter in Hamburg Rudolf from Urbanshit recently wrote about a project by graphic designer and illustrator Christoph Niemann, who’s currently living and working in Berlin. Niemann abstracted a sample of the New York’s subway map and turned it into a tile pattern. The result is a neat and coloful interior design for […]
Multi-Sensorial Gastronomy: The Future Of Flavor
‘Feeding the Senses’ is an interesting novelty in the field of food future. Before we’ve been talking about Philips’ food explorations and instant food installations, such as the Biotower and the food printer. The invention presented here is another step in the way we can think about food, this time focusing on ‘haute cuisine’. Feeding […]
Become A Fan!
Yesterday we finally opened a Facebook page devoted to this blog, Pop-Up City. Hereby we'd like to invite you to join the network and make it a happy, vibrant place. We'll be filling the page with all kinds of content in the coming time. Furthermore we encourage you to post good stuff as well. Click here to go to the Pop-Up City page and become a fan.
On Plug-In Retail
In August I wrote about a walking grill in Berlin. My article triggered Junk Jet Magazine to invite me to contribute to its third volume. This issue, which is made in collaboration with the University of Stuttgart, has been launched recently. It has become a great product containing all sorts of pop-up city-related items. You can order one of the spare 555 copies at the Junkjet website or Amazon. I'd like to share my article on plug-in retail with you.
