Saddened by the sight of abandoned needlework, a family of designers at Frederique Morrel have made upcycling tapestry their main passion. From old piles of handmade drapes, to forgotten pillows, to intricately woven knick-knaks leftover from the neigbor’s rummage sale, these designers are rescuing embroidery from oblivion by transforming passed over pieces into new beautifully crafted foot-stools, couches, and stunning woodland creatures.
Yet another reason New Yorkers might be jealous: the city of San Francisco has just announced 19.2 million dollars in new funding for energy efficiency programs. The bulk of the funds will go to EnergyWatch, a program that provides free energy efficiency assessments and low-cost retrofits for businesses and multi-family residences in the city.
Why settle for a postcard of the Mona Lisa, when you could have a hand-carved leaf engraved with her mysterious face? Making art with leaves isn’t a new idea, but several online purveyors have taken the medium to a new level. Offering up intricately cut images of everything from landscapes to the female form to even Napoleon – yes, you can have the face of the famous emperor cut into a leaf and framed - sustainable art just got a little more interesting.
Where do rotary phones sit within today’s more modern, more digitized world? Does our constant manipulation of these familiar and classic, yet obsolete, objects in art and design signify a desire for a more natural state of being? Jean Luc Cornec’s exhibit at the Museum of Communications in Frankfurt seems to imply as much. The exhibition presses visitors to recall more simplified times through a flock of free-roaming sheep sculpted from old, analog, rotary phones.
If you’re in the Bay Area right now, you have an extraordinary opportunity to take a glimpse into the work of two eco-art pioneers: Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Since 1974, the Harrisons have focused their work on hot button environmental topics, addressing dire issues such as global warming. Their latest project dubbed Greenhouse Britain is currently on exhibit at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. The exhibit features models and renderings focused on the Earth’s rising sea levels, strategies for survival and alternative futures.
The idea of a tree made from paper is kind of sad and ironic. Luckily, design group Le Creative Sweatshop constructed this paper tree from recycled, FSC-certified and carbon-neutral paper stock. Ultimately, this beautiful and intricate artwork is a plug for a generous act by Arjowiggins Creative Papers, who have pledged to save one hectare of Brazilian rainforest for every delegate at last month’s COP15 conference.
San Francisco has just announced that it will be continuing its popular Sunday Streets program next year with new dates and locations for 2010! Running for the past two years, the event closes off a series of roads to vehicular traffic and and opens them to street parties, bike-riding, and uninhibited power-walking. Announced by Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the new series of Sunday Streets will expand into new neighborhoods, have longer hours, and will stop traffic on a total of nine days in 2010 as the program settles into a pleasant permanency.
For some closing thoughts on the cultural flurry in Copenhagen, Inhabitat turned to Patricia Watts. As the founder of ecoartspace, she has been curating, organizing, discussing, analyzing and writing about eco-art since before it was cool thing to do. With so many conflicting views on the state of art and eco-art today, Watts gave us an exlusive interview offering up her own thought-provoking perspective on the difference between art and activism, art and propaganda, and the prowess behind fake press releases.
To get the word on the cultural scene at COP15, Inhabitat asked some juicy questions of Ian Garrett, co-founder of the Center for Sustainable Practice of the Art (CSPA). Garrett also teaches Sustainable Theater and Management Technology courses at the California Institute of the Arts, which makes him the perfect guy to get the green perspective on this massive climate-cultural gathering. Read on to hear his take on creative demonstrating, tipping points, and the paradox of flying to a conference about global warming!
Whether it’s through education, perspective-shifting installations, scientific research, or direct action, art is very much a part of the global-warming dialogue and this has never been more apparent than during COP15. Beyond the flock of individual installations and exhibitions currently showing in Copenhagen, numerous COP15 focused exhibitions and spin-offs are appearing beyond the borders of Denmark. Over the next week Inhabitat will be jumping into all that is COP15 eco-art, but before we do that we’d love to give you a sampling of our favorite standouts thus far!
This unbelievable city piled high with trash is a real place called Garbage City, outside of Cairo in Egypt. It’s populated by a community of workers called Zabbaleen, who personally collect, sort, reuse, resell or otherwise repurpose Cairo’s waste. Recently several photographers have trained their cameras upon the city, and now we see what it would really be like to live in the aftermath of our own consumption.
This holiday, ditch the traditional gingerbread house and make your confectionary construction eco-themed! Khai Foo & Elise Young of Solus Decor and Eastside Design have taken all the sugary pleasures of the gingerbread structures we know and love, and put a sweet eco-twist on them with their Earthship Lollipop! “Combining old school wisdom and high tech convenience, the Earthship Lollipop features a rammed-icing English Mint wall with high Cocoa-mass qualities to mitigate sweet-loss,” write the designers. They created their eco-conscious treat as part of Creative Room’s Gingerbread competition, where architects laid down their foam core and picked up cookie dough and rice crispy treats in a glorious battle of edible model-making – all to raise funds for Architecture for Humanity. Read on to see the yummy interior of the Earthship Lollipop.
While Barack Obama visits Copenhagen this week for the United Nations Framework Convention, he may catch a rousing and informative glimpse of a ton of CO2. And we don’t just mean “a lot” of exhaust coming out of his secret service’s cars – we mean an actual 27-foot cube of CO2. In an installation by Alfio Bonanno and Christophe Cornubert, the “CO2 Cube” is a representation of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted each month by the average person in an industrialized country, or in the case of the United States, every two weeks.
If you’re looking for a way to recover from the rampant consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you might want to head out to the Mina Dresden Gallery tonight for a chance to party, collect amazing eco-art, and support two non-profts at the green sight + sound benefit! Awesome eco-artists like Nils Udo, Ned Kahn, Josh Keyes, and Inhabitat’s own Abigail Doan will be putting their work up for auction with proceeds going to the 4th season of ME’D1.ATE’s Soundwave Festival entitled GREEN SOUND as well as other programs at ecoartspace.
In this modern age of light pollution, cities that never sleep, 24 hour streaming TV and addictive RSS feeds, regulating one’s own circadian rhythms can be, well…difficult. And for those of us who have a computer strapped to our torsos at all times, watching a sunrise or sunset (somewhere other than Youtube) is a luxury that we are lucky to experience once in a blue moon. Luckily, the Whitney Museum of Art has developed a way for us to check out more sunsets – on their website. That’s right – EcoArtTech’s Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir have programmed the WMA site to dim and illuminate, corresponding with New York’s real-life cycles of light.
Conspiracy! Author James Hoggan realizes the ridiculousness of that word, asserting that it “strains credulity and is offensive in its own right.” Yet the massive media sway that he details in Climate Cover-Up feels like something a squinty, scruffy, clipboard-wielding man would accost you with. It turns out that most of the oft-quoted global warming skeptics are not climate scientists, and are not published in credible scientific journals. They are funded mostly by think tanks which are, in turn, funded by fossil fuel companies. “There are conspiracies aplenty,” he writes, ” documented and undeniable.” The central conspiracy here is the perpetuation of global warming uncertainty. His book puts out the serious details.
The phrases “melting polar ice caps” and “rising water lines” are so ubiquitous now that they’ve almost lost their meaning. It’s all too easy to think “it will happen to that city, not mine.” Well to give us a bit more perspective, Studio Lindfors has presented us with these hauntingly realistic post-flood visions of New York and Tokyo. In a future partially submerged by melting glacier water, gondolas reemerge as a form of travel, riverside plants nestle up against neon street signs, and aquaculture blooms under bridges. It’s Water World without Mel Gibson to ease the blow – scary.
It’s a ghost highway in the middle of LA! Not the result of road closures, the apocalypse, a zombie scare, or a massive increase in the price of petroleum, this series of car-less highways are the brainchild of photographer Tom Baker. Curious as to what a traffic-less Los Angeles would look like, Baker went ahead and created this vision through the wonders of photoshop. The result is a series of images that are eerily calming.
If the earth could make music, what kind of songs would it sing? This crazy contraption, called the Terrafon, actually lets us find out the answer to that question! Designed as a huge turntable tone arm and transducer, this musical instrument plays the earth like a big gravelly vinyl record. Artists Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke premiered it as part of a performance entitled “Harvest” at the Volt Music Festival in Sweden. Read on to check out the video of these determined choir musicians as they drag the big wooden tool-of-music through the Swedish countryside.
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.
