One of the main principles of permaculture is that “the problem is the solution.” Problem: tons of waste cups created by attendees of the OutsideLands concert in San Francisco. Solution: a fabulous recycled cup canopy. BIOS Design Collective tapped a keg and invited their friends over for a canopy party, building a gorgeous wave of concave color at Stable Cafe just in time for Architecture and the City.
Seoul, South Korea is filled with blinding light-up displays and headache-inducing neon screens. But residents of the city who want to see these displays put to good use need only take a trip to the World Cup Stadium’s Peace Park, which is where this beautiful Living Light sculpture blooms. The permanent outdoor pavilion and glass canopy projects up-to-the minnute information about local air quality, and locals can send it a text message to receive a report from anywhere.
It never ceases to surprise us that much of good, sustainable design is also deliciously fun. Take Debbie Wijskamp’s paperpulp cabinets, for instance. They are what their name implies: drawers and shelves made out of pureed paper mache. And while I want to write sophisticated sentences with phrases like ‘materials reuse’ and ‘resource conservation,’ I just can’t help thinking about how glorious it must be, in a third-grade sort of way, to mash paper into furniture. Wijskamp’s process validates these daydreams.
Spoiler alert: The Yes Men do actually fix the world– but only on paper. For years this two-man team has been pranking conferences, newscasts, and exhibitions by posing as representatives of the world’s biggest environmental transgressors. While speaking as DOW Chemical, they publicly apologized for the Bhopal disaster. While pretending to be from Halliburton, they demonstrated the Survivaball, a human disaster survival suit: prohibitively expensive and visually ridiculous. In a particularly complicated stunt, they created a fake version of the New York Times announcing everything from the end of the war in Iraq to the creation of a maximum wage law. They have provoked, embarrassed, ridiculed and shocked many captains of industry. Driven, ultimately, by the desire to address serious issues with humor and radical intervention, The Yes Men Fix the World in a documentary that pits itself against unchecked greed.
DIY graffiti doesn’t have to be ugly– it can be thought-provoking, challenging, and perhaps most importantly, temporary. Jesse Graves, an artist based in Milwaukee Wisconsin, has harnessed mud as an artistic medium to take his green graffiti to the streets, and he encourages others to do the same.
Wine makes the whole world more beautiful. Seriously, can you argue otherwise, given wine bottle cheese boards, used cork accoutrement — and now, these stunning light boxes from artist Tracey Johnson? They’re made out of used wine crates and a little bit of magic. Can’t tell? Read on.
So, by this point, I think it’s pretty clear that we, the humans, have messed up on a pretty grand scale. You don’t need me to read you the stats again. We need several more planets. We make and consume a lot of crap. There are islands of crap in the ocean. There’s crap in the rivers, crap in our bodies, crap in the air. All of this crap is difficult to digest, you know, on a daily level. Nobly, many artists are facing this pile of crap and trying to make compost from it. Problem is, some eco-art is actually pretty crappy.
Re-inventing ordinary street dividers and concrete balls, Liesbet Bussche creates larger-than-life jewelry pieces for the streets of Amsterdam. The Belgian designer makes small interventions to the street scape, a charm to a chain or earring backs to a concrete ball. However, altogether the jewelry can easily make any passer-by smile upon finding a serendipitous change in the uniform vocabulary of the urban …
Stunning, no? Apparently some icebergs have stripes, and it’s not the result of Photoshop or internet pranks or penguin sledding or any outside manipulation. You might have seen these shots in an email that’s made the rounds– it’s even been examined by snopes.com and hoax-slayer.com. The email includes a series of beautiful photos of candy-striped ice-scapes. The stripes are real, the result of natural pressures and formations. Nature’s got this one covered — thanks — no prestigious exhibition needed.
While transforming reclaimed office chairs and stereo equipment into fully functional sound systems – the ideas behind Mikal Hameed’s work could address the disconnect that many feel towards the current Green Movement. As he considers himself only to be “green out of necessity,” Hameed recognizes that the work he produces is reflective of the struggle and indifference experienced by much of society. He is passionate about bringing people together through the shared experience of music, and it is this passion that has led him to becoming our very own eco-friendly shaman of sound. Last week I had the chance to visit Mikal’s studio, and get to know more about where he find his materials, inspiration and his feelings about being called eco.
Capturing the usually short-lived moments of a blooming bud, environmental artist Richard Solomon’s Seed Orbs encapsulate Goat’s Beard seed heads in glass balls. As an artist, Solomon has worked with plant materials for 20 years — attempting to highlight their beauty while expressing the mystery of nature. Solomon makes the Seed Orbs by first collecting Goat’s Beard buds around the mountains …
For this year’s International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell created this garden installation called Dymaxion Sleep. The project featured a hammock-like structure floating above triangulated planting beds modeled after Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map. With scents of lavender, lemon geranium and peppermint wafting up the resters noses, the project is the perfect place to lounge outdoors.
Via Pruned
As advancements in lighting technology unveil fresh materials, we’re thrilled to see designers exploring new ways to light up the night. SonUmbra is a solar-powered tree composed of strands of light-emitting fabric woven into a lucent web of branches. The installation’s canopy of photovoltaic panels captures light during the day, and once the sun sets the tree blooms in an interactive flourish of light and sound.
A lush lawn can be a wonderful thing to stretch out on. Unfortunately, the high-maintenance needs, which include frequent seeding and fertilizing, of grass can make it more of a pain than a joy, leaving would-be loungers disappointed. Fortunately, grassy seating can put back some of the fun. The idea of creating seating out of grass is no new concept, as you may find with the lawnge chairs or living lawn chaise. In this formulation, the Floating Green, by Ling Fan, is a stretch of lawn that appears to have rebelled against horizontality by springing from the ground, doing an elegant twist and then settling into a vertically folded position to offer passers-by a place to sit.
Responding to current economic, social and environmental crises, London’s NEF (the new economics foundation) have recently launched plans for “The Bigger Picture: A Festival of Interdependence,” a series of creative activities and events, including lectures, film screenings and art exhibitions, beginning in autumn 2009. The festival will culminate in a large-scale, public event in central London on 24 October 2009 (11:00AM-18:00PM) when an interactive, living exhibition will be staged in the dramatic post-industrial setting of the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank.
Only 14% of plastic water bottles are recycled, and Americans add 30 million PET water bottles to landfills every day! Design firm MSLK has made its statement about plastic bottle use with Watershed, a series of bottle-droplets hanging in rain-like strings from a massive tree. The installation will be showcased at tonight’s Age of Stupid opening and will then travel to the D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge festival, carrying with it some hefty statistics about guilt and trash-making.
Park(ing) Day! Parking space invasion day! The day to roll out some sod, fire up the barbeque, and set out in the street like it’s your front porch. If you didn’t hear about it from us, from the event site, or from last year’s awesome photos, then you must not have gotten the telegram, ’cause this is the best reason to cruise around the city on bikes since you were 10 years old.
Holy leaping legos! This cratalicious creature may, at first glance, appear to be some kind of primitive transformer, but he actually deserves a lot more respect that. For this is none other than Crate Man! As his name implies, his mysterious erectors lovingly built him and a whole clan of crate peeps out of primary-colored crates – you know, the kind used to ship milk jugs in. As large and in charge as Crate Man may seem, he’s really a bit shy so not much is know about him. Read on to see the facts that we have gathered and ogle other personified crate creations.
HAPPY PARK(ing) DAY!
Keep your eyes open today for impromptu public parks popping up in parking spots around the world as hundreds of peeps take part in PARK(ing) Day! Wow, that was a tongue-twister if we ever heard one. This annual event, started by San Francisco art collective REBAR, is meant to encourage creativity, civic engagement, and interaction and is open to anyone who wants to set up their own park. The Inhabitat Team …
If you’re in the Bay Area and want to catch a glimpse of some on-point environmental artwork, head out to Swarm Gallery this weekend (hey, the Bay Bridge is back open, right?). On display at the gallery, until tomorrow (Sunday, September 13th), are works from Josh Keyes, whose surreal paintings you might have seen gracing the parking structure next to the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, and Vaughn Bell, a Seattle-based artist who is hilarious, by which I mean you can stick your head in a box full of plants.
Making art with animals. Making art with animals? Not animals tacked on walls. Not animals stuffed with cotton. Animals as co-creators, as collaborators. Really? Interspecies says: Yes. It’s a series of exhibitions, performances, lectures and workshops examining the human/non-human relationship, and it is happening October 2-4 at A Foundation in London. There will be naps with pigs, playtime with monkeys, communications with fish, and the general exploding of the species barrier.
Education is the key to conservation, and Ian Shive’s photographs in The National Parks: Our American Landscape enlighten viewers with a rare, adrenaline-filled look at the phenomenal beauty of the American backdrop. Shive’s photography offers a fresh outlook on nature, making a hairy tarantula in the Chihuahuan Desert featured in an extreme close-up, appear as a dazzling wild gem, and depicting a giant Sequoia Tree as it reaches deep into the sky, its branches blending with the stars. In the book’s collection of 200+ photographs, Shive manages to both capture the magnificence of too grand for words settings while enabling the viewer to interact with the environment and process moments in time on an individual level.
There is something so fascinating about miniature worlds and peering down from above and imagining all the intricate daily happenings of the tiny people who live there. What if that tiny world was made up of re-purposed kitchen and hardware items that were forged together in some sort of crazy modern industrial architectural style? Well, that’s what David Trautrimas did with his amazing series of digital photographs “Habitat Machines.” His body of work is both exciting and inspiring with retro lines, cool metal finishes and are the ultimate in recycled materials.
100 child-sized ice sculptures sit in Beijing’s Temple of Earth to represent the 1 billion lives that will be lost in Asia due to water shortages caused by climate change. The art installation marks the launch of the TckTckTck Campaign, a campaign that works to raise awareness of the importance of a fair and ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit, taking place from December 7 to 18, 2009, where world leaders will gather to establish a plan to protect the world’s population from climate change.
In the Gunma prefecture of Japan there sits an elaborate statue of the Buddha housed within a community hall. From a distance the intricate statue seems to be covered with thousands of gems and jewels… until a closer look reveals that it is actually composed of tens of thousands of dead insects! The statue took the artist over 6 years to create, and while it might be the creepiest religious icon we’ve ever seen, we admire the artist’s incredible use of natural, biodegradable materials.
A retail lot in Austin, Texas recently sprouted a stunning field of solar sunflowers that soak up the sun’s rays to provide shade while generating a steady stream of renewable energy. Designed by public art team Harries/Heder, the installation consists of 15 flower-like solar photovoltaic panels located on a pedestrian and bike path between the village of Mueller and Austin’s highway I-35. According to Harries/Heder, the flowers are “an icon for the sustainable, LEED certified Mueller Development and a highly visible metaphor for the energy conscious City of Austin.”
This Saturday, join environmental art gallery Collectively GRASP for its closing reception. After more than a year of exhibiting eco-art, gallery Owner/Director Aileen Meehan will be closing the art space to recover from the demands of running the gallery while working full-time. Like many businesses, GRASP has been affected by the economic downturn, however, Meehan is choosing to end GRASP’s life with a celebration rather than a funeral. The closing reception will be TONIGHT (August 15th) from 6-9pm at the gallery: 850 Greenwich St, off Columbus, SF, 94133.
Nature as artistic collaborator: we’ve seen it in the performance paintings of Olly and Suzie, in the sculptural rock-stackings of Zach Pine and Andy Goldsworthy, and in the plein-air tree drawings of Tim Knowles. Now composer and sound designer Diego Stocco has partnered with a tree in his backyard to create a delightfully fun musical jam. So go ahead, boogie down with the branches.
When Stonehedge was created, its builders used stones — making the space all about stone and light. Cycles and spirits. Seasons and sacrifice. Today, the “beings” that dominate our physical and energetic landscape are (arguably) cars. So it is no surprise that artist Jim Reinders has re-invented Stonehenge with scrap vehicles. The sculpture of sorts, which is fittingly called Carhenge, attracts thousands of worshippers — ahem, tourists — every year to its home in Alliance, Nebraska.
Although its name implies tongue twisters or dancing dwarfs, Prix Pictet is a distinguished international photography award for artists focused on environmental sustainability and has just announced their shortlist. Last year’s winner, Benoit Aquin, documented the effects and creation of deserts in China. This year’s 12 nominees depict the destruction of the environment through the exploitation of the world’s resources. Click through the gallery to see images from all the nominees!
Skateboards these days are amazing examples of graphic design, and some are practically objets d’art – what a shame that they should to go to a landfill after the boards have lost their pop! Thankfully, Pennsylvania-based Deckstools is here to keep art from the trash heap and to add style to your pad with their striking line of furniture made from reclaimed skateboards.
Grandmas make some pretty awesome things – pies, sweaters, and techinically, you. But can you say that your grandma ever made a village??? Ours certainly didn’t. Between 1956 and 1981 Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey built Bottle Village using tens of thousands of bottles in mortar. The village is “an otherworld of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, random constructions, plus 15 life size structures all made from found objects.” The 1/3 acre lot in Simi Valley, CA is literally littered with the various structures that Ms. Prisbrey created as a hobby, constructive creative outlet and playful reminder of the joy of upcycling. Unfortunately, a 1994 earthquake has left the village damaged and in need of repair, but recent media attention has helped bring in new visitors and a renewed interest in preserving this wonderful and unique place.
Artist Brandon Jan Blommaert has stunned us with his virtual trash sculptures. In a gorgeous series of images, junk-crafted megafauna roam the mountaintops and landscapes of our planet, picking fights, searching for food, and striking poses in front of sunsets. Further proof that green design rules the planet, we say.
Melting ice: it’s the metaphor of our age. Here on Inhabitat, we’ve seen melting penguins, melting furniture, and melting little men. In case you missed theses visuals of climate change, in case those images of ice holes from An Inconvenient Truth are fading from memory, in case you’re bored on August 1st around 11 am, Chin Chih Yang has a not-so-gentle reminder for you. He’s bringing 21,000 lbs of ice to Union Square in New York City. As it melts, it will be raising flashing red hell with emergency lights triggered by the melting, protesting its own demise.
Ever wonder what our modern-day cities could look like 100 years from now in a perfect world? Architect Luc Schuiten endeavors to find out with his Vegetal City installation, currently on display in Brussels. The entrance, made up of an archway with branches covered in blinking yellow lights, leads the exhibit’s visitors into a magical world of architectural drawings and models of cities where city residents live peacefully with nature.
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