Bookmark Your Favorite Locations With Grafetee
Grafetee is a new app that makes it possible to bookmark your favorite locations. Available for iOS and Android smartphones, the app enables users to bookmark real-world places and share them with friends. Whether you're planning to buy a new home, make a travel plan or just want to collect interesting places for future reference, then Grafetee says to be helpful. The app works pretty much the same as bookmark service Delicious, but helps you to store interesting locations instead of interesting websites.
Urbanana: The Tropical Urban Farm For Cold Cities
Instead of producing local food on small urban wastelands, urban farming could better focus on producing fruits and vegetables that are not really growing naturally. The French architecture agency SOA Architects did so by designing an urban banana farm for cities like Paris. The so-called Urbanana (nice name) is a huge greenhouse that actually fits the dimensions of the city — it can be built right in between houses and offices and offers the opportunity to produce food on the scale needed in the city. When this project will be realized, Parisians can eat local bananas that are both sustainable and a real contribution to a city's food culture.
New Ideas For Parking Spots
You all know PARK(ing) Day, the annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks. "But why only parks?" the people of Berlin-based Stiftung Freizeit must have asked themselves. Their Labplatz project explores new ideas and concepts for temporary occupation of parking spots in the city.
MIT Designs Foldable Electric Cars
We've seen electric cars morph into various shapes and sizes, but have we ever thought to make them foldable? MIT did, with their Hiroki car. While this neat little innovation does little for running performance, it will greatly improve parking and storage efficiency, which fits nicely into the recent 'micro-city' trend. Three foldable cars can stack into one standard parking space.
Urban Hacktivists Take Over Street Ads In Toronto
Similar to a recent posting on Jilly Ballistic, the targets of this guerrilla artwork are advertisements. In general, billboards are a blight on the urbanscape. But, what if these eyesores took up space meant to provide city dwellers and visitors with useful information? The creative team, cARTographyTO, has been responsible for hacking 35 advertisement signs (ironically named […]
Sweet Dangle: Suspended Architecture In Liverpool
Talk about an unsettled view. As part of Liverpool’s biennale, artist Do Ho Suh decided to suspend part of a house in between two existing structures. Even though a description of the materials used in the piece seems relatively mundane (“Steel structural frame with sub timber frame, Filcor 45 FRA EPS bounded to 19 mm marine plywood, painted finish”), the result is a jolt when we consider what an alley normally looks like.
QR Box Store Opens Doors In The Hague
Remember the box store? In The Hague, an interesting new retail concept has opened doors recently. Twiet.nu is a cross-over between a box store and a webshop. The company rents out boxes in a shopping street window to webshop owners which they can use to display their products offline for once and promote it to another group of potentially interested people. By scanning a QR code shoppers can purchase products immediately on their smartphones.
Rooftop Tea Party
Have you ever had the chance to gaze upon a dense, old neighbourhood from a lofty vantage point? The intricately interwoven rooftops of varying slopes, shapes and sizes, sheathed in brightly coloured terra cotta shingles is quite a sight to behold. Now you can be part of that remarkable landscape — in comfort while enjoying a spot of tea — thanks to Lithuanian designer Ainė Bunikytė's 'Ridged Rooftop Furniture'.
The Weather Yesterday
As part of 2012's London Festival of Architecture, interaction design firm Troika launched a beautiful thought-provoking installation at Hoxton Square. Celebrating the weather as a predominant topic of discussion in British culture, 'The Weather Yesterday' is a five-meter high sculpture that shows the weather and temperature at any point of time exactly as it was the previous day.
Medicine That Blooms In Your Cup
You have probably heard of flowering tea, which is just as much of an experience to watch as it is to drink — an unseemly pod that blossoms right before your eyes when you immerse it in water, transforming the liquid into fragrant tea. Singaporean student Chan Min Yun has taken a similar approach for medicine in her design project, blooms. She packaged three common medicines in origami forms. The thin water-resistant paper used causes the packaging to unfold when immersed in water, creating a blooming effect.
IKEA Lounge Makes The Airport Temporarily Feel Like Home
People who have to wait for a connection at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris can now spend their time in an environment that feels like home. The Swedish furniture brand IKEA has opened a new VIP lounge that houses over 220-square meters of family-friendly space.
Clone City: Austrian Village Erected In China
This one is less about pop-up urbanism and more about something that recently just popped up in a pretty seemingly random place. Namely, Austria in China. There’s been a remarkable amount of media coverage about this development, from science and technology magazines and architecture blogs to mass media distributors and major state media corporations, reporting on an identical clone of Hallstatt, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located on Austria’s Hallstätter See. Not a single detail was left out on the perfect simulacrum, including building details and major monuments. Simulacritecture at its absolute finest, one could say.
Wuppertal LEGO Bridge Has A Green Roof
LEGO keeps inspiring urbanists, architects and urban interventionists. Street artist Martin Heuwold aka MEGX transformed a boring urban bridge into a colorful LEGO-like artwork in Wuppertal, Germany. With the help of friends, the city and some construction companies, MEGX spiced up the concrete beams of the viaduct with colorful paint.
Smartphone App Favortree Rewards Users For Improving The Neighborhood
Borrow a lawn mower, lend a video game, offer a ride to the airport or find a babysitter. Favortree is a new favor-trading app for smartphones that rewards its users for helping people in their neighborhoods. All users of the app have a virtual tree, and the more they help their neighbors, the more this digital tree grows. Favortree has launched in a beta version and is is currently looking for communities of at least five people to start playing this 'play-it-forward' game.
Musical Umbrella Turns The City Into A Symphony
It's a rainy Summer here in Amsterdam, so let's stay with the umbrella theme. Thanks to Make we found out about this rather cool umbrella that's able to play music when it rains. For the occasion of Music Hackday 2012 in Amsterdam, Berlin-based hackers Alice Zappe and Julia Lager managed to create a musical umbrella that produces a random series of lo-fi 8-bit tones as soon as rain drops fall on it.
