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.
Zombie chair! Out for your wood scraps! Oozing sawdust and pure carnage! Designer Hongtao Zhou, who we found playing with ice, decided to get Holiday on a broken, abandoned chair he found on the streets in Madison, Wisconsin. The result: chair of the undead, risen from the swamp and demanding the chance to sit in your living room looking creepy. Zhou created the drippy effect with wood scraps and sawdust (and probably some monster blood and glue). Expect this chair on your front porch Halloween night, demanding all the sweet linseed oil you can muster. Happy creepy chair night, everyone, happy monster night.
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 of the northern Mexico, then as they are ready to bloom, he places them in the orbs, leaving them to bloom inside. The effect of the blooming Goat’s Beard bud in the glass is soft and delicate, leaving us to admire the diffused light and wonder at its ability to elicit ideas of mysticism.
via GreenMuze
Through the end of August, the Museum of Arts and Design is hosting a weekly evening of good drinks, food and art on Thursdays starting at 5:00 PM. Big fans of pay-as-you-wish admission to museums, the Inhabitat team went on the first night. As we wandered around the museum, we were easily enamored with the objects on display. And then we wondered — in an eco-world, are these objects responsible? What about functionality? Is creating something just for the sake of looking at it, a waste of resources? So this week, we’ve been scouring for designers who have a knack for creating objects that inspire us with great curiosity, but are created with eco-responsibility.
Designboom has us wondering how many components you can subtract from a chair and still make it structurally sound with Timothy Lile’s Less Chair.
Designsponge inspired us with the simple rustic look of these lamps by Zeke Leonard.
Atelier29 talks about a tree trunk bench that proves any tree trunk can become seating — in fact, Jurgen Bey only sells the chair backs, ready to be installed into any tree trunk.
Design Milk features the Barnacle Chair, a comfy chair perfect for small spaces, made of reclaimed industrial felt and sustainably-harvested ash.
Dutch artist Geke Wouters has created a stunning collection of paper-thin bowls made from carrots, peppers, beet root, leeks, tomatoes, and other vegetables. Each delicate piece of edible art is made using a proprietary drying and forming process that converts organic materials into the paper thin layers, giving you the sense of a microscopic view into their intricate cellular structure. True to their natural materials, no two of these vegetable bowls are exactly alike.
Not since the advent of the tin can telephone have we seen such an ingenious use for cast-off cans! Designer and recent graduate of Northumbria University Jack Bresnahan has created a set of nine lids that will turn any ordinary can into an industrial-chic container that looks like it came from a museum store. Made from biodegradable plastic, the sterile-looking white lids will transform a can into a vase, soap dispenser, sugar caster, tea and coffee canisters, toothbrush holder, money box, or desk organizer.
Inhabitat is happy to report that Dwell on Design, the west coast’s largest modern design event, featured more smart green design than ever before this year. When we walked the floor yesterday with Dwell Publisher and President Michela O’Connor Abrams (and the carpenter and designer from HGTV’s Carter Can show), it was clear to see that the majority of the companies showcasing their products and services at the three-day festival are paying a great deal more attention to sustainability than in the past. We guestimate that about 80% of the companies there were promoting some kind of green story – in a varying shades, of course. Read on for our highlights from the show!
Talk about bringing the outdoors in! This Chaise Lawn Chair is perfect for citydwellers who want that fresh cut grass feeling without the hassle of a full lawn. Designed by Deger Cengiz, the lounger is sure to elicit a chuckle from your friends. And if you really want to show them a good time, cart them around and take full advantage of the human transporter (wheelbarrow) functionality. Note: It is not recommended for use on stairs.
When we first saw this living, growing Garden Chair we quickly found ourselves captivated by its whimsical nature and perfect union between pure green design and functionality. But don’t be confused. What looks like something straight out of Narnia, is in fact the product of an ingenious method of tree shaping developed by a couple of artists at Pooktre!
Grey skies got you down? Turn to Simon Enever’s very clever Ella umbrella stand to brighten your home and remedy those rainy day blues. This rather elegant new age umbrella stand uses rainwater from your umbrella to feed thirsty grass and adds a fun spot of green to your foyer.
If you’re looking for unique home accessories that are environmentally friendly and have a clean and elegant design quality, you’ll want to check out Corque’s new collection crafted with – you guessed it – cork! From the fun Rolha candle holder which allows users to turn old bottles into candelabras, to funky Topography placemats, which bring rough terrain to the table, their “Designing Living Objects” line truly showcases the versatility of cork.
Looking for the perfect hostess gift for summertime soirees? Jill-able Fill Me Up Vases are cleverly designed, eco-friendly vases that will add a magical flair to organic floral offerings. Jill-able vases are recyclable plastic bags that stand up straight when filled with water. After they have held and displayed a bouquet, they may be folded, stored flat, and re-used time and again. …
Philadelphia-based design team MIO has upped the ante for end-user creativity yet again with the introduction of their first LED light fixture. Called Trask because it can switch from being “track” or “task” lighting, the function of this ingenious flatpack lighting system is completely up to you! The modular units can form everything from desk lamps to linkable suspension lights, giving this eco-centric product the option to snake its way across your entire room.
Would you believe that this eye-catching lamp was made for under one dollar? ‘Sleeve’ by Sara Ebert is a lampshade made from a Salvation Army sweater and a discarded apple juice bottle. Showcased as part of Pratt’s ‘Design for a Dollar’ exhibit at ICFF 2009, ‘Sleeve’ was crafted with an eye toward minimizing energy, labor, materials, and transportation costs and waste. It’s beautiful, smart, and straightforward–exactly the way good design should be.
If you’re looking for some tongue-in-cheek, slightly ironic wall decoration, look no farther than Cardboard Safari. The Charlottesville–based e-tailer draws inspiration from nature and relies on sustainable and recycled materials to bring their designs to life. Each cardboard animal is laser-cut for precision and flat-packed to make shipping easier and less wasteful. In addition to their signature ‘trophy’ heads (bison, deer, moose, and rhino), Cardboard Safari offers full-bodied animals …
Traditional wall coverings often use PVC, a harmful and toxic material that has been known to leech into the air, so buying toxin-free textiles is an important health consideration that can’t be ignored. Mod Green Pod was founded by Lisa and Nancy Mims as a means to offer safer —and more fashionable— alternatives to conventional textile prints. Their products not just graphically gorgeous, but green in their materiality, completely free of vinyl, and use water-based inks on 100% certified organic cotton-based fabric.
The adjective cute doesn’t usually cross our minds when it comes to kitchen gardening — but that certainly changed when we saw these egg-shaped containers sprouting green leafy specimens. Called an eggling for the shape of its container, each little ceramic egg is shipped whole — requiring its owner to lightly crack open the top to create an opening for the plant to grow …
Chirp chirp! Tweet tweet! As the weather warms up, the birds are coming out to play, and what better way to celebrate than with some stylish modern bird-friendly designs for homes and gardens. Perch! is a collection of bird-friendly ceramics from Amy Adams. Brooklyn-based designer Amy Adams makes her wares out of earthenware and sculpts them into voluminous shapes using a low fire and non-toxic glaze. With little decoration, the design of the wares are very minimalist, however, we think their shapes are extremely expressive and dare we say, adorable? All ceramics can be easily cleaned with mild soap and water. They also come with a leather cord that was tanned with vegetable dyes. So spruce up your garden for spring and befriend some modern birdies today with Perch!
With daylight savings time just around the corner, the temptation to simply turn back time is certainly an alluring one. Who wants to lose an hour of sleep, particularly on a chilly Sunday morning, when there are so many winks to still savor. For all of you sleepyheads and music lovers out there, The Grateful Thread’s recycled vinyl wall clocks will make you feel as if time is in your hands with these very cool, retro albums re-fashioned as custom-designed wall pieces.
We’re big fans of eco-friendly bamboo kitchenware company Bambu, and we’re excited to see that they have recently released a beautiful new line of organic bamboo bowls that are perfect for adding a dose of color to grey winter days. Dubbed Outside-In Bowls, each brilliant little vessel is made from 100% organically grown bamboo that has been coiled and shaped by hand. We love how …
Drumroll please… in keeping with the gift-giving spirit of the holidays, we’re excited to announce the official opening of the Inhabitat Shop! We’ve spent the past months assembling a stellar lineup of the hottest examples of cutting-edge green design, and we’re excited to offer an excellent assortment of items for you. From fresh sustainable styles to eco-friendly furnishings, sustainable home decor, and great green gadgets, the Inhabitat shop is your go-to source for our favorite finds in green design.
San Francisco residents looking to deck their halls with green holiday decor will be excited to hear that for a limited time the SF Environment Department is teaming up with Friends of the Urban Forest to offer living Christmas trees that will be replanted in neighborhoods after the holidays! Although they’re not your classic x-mas evergreens, these adopted saplings offer an excellent alternative to clear-cut trees, and will live on as a gift to the community long after the holiday season.
When it comes to mobiles, everyone knows that they can make great nursery decorations and playthings for babies, but sophisticated, abstract mobiles can also function equally well as artsy decor for grownups. Such is the case with Frazier & Wing’s beautiful recycled magazine mobiles. Made from hundreds of paper cut-outs from old magazines, and strung in linear cascading forms, …
What if we could light our homes with glowing wallpaper rather than having to rely on electric lights? Swedish designer Camilla Diedrich has asked this exact question, and in response, created a stunning line of luminescent wallpaper that is lit by fiber optics. Her Nature Ray Charles Wallpaper features a delicate assortment of floral motifs that shine through in lucid lines, adding a touch of energy-efficient ambiance to any room.
WEmake’s beautiful Beryl and Friends lamps are composed from cast-off bases and lampshades that have fallen out of favor. The designers carefully refinish each component and then recombine them to eclectic effect, re-wiring and re-stocking them with low energy bulbs. Beryl and Friends were included in (re)design’s ‘Lighten up‘ exhibition at 100% Design at this year’s London Design Festival.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure when it comes to Joana Meroz’s beautiful service tableware. Beginning with cracked porcelain ware, the Brazilian/Israeli designer fills each crack with gold luster and then embellishes each piece with decorative self-made transfers, resulting in elegant, re-invented tableware. This creative method of celebrating imperfections and revitalizing “damaged” goods is being featured at the Gr3en Design Reduce-Reuse- Recycle Exhibition which features Finnish, Belgian and Dutch designers. A worthy addition, Joana Meroz’s tableware offers the sophistication of fine dining ware while gaining green cred by keeping cracked tableware out of the dumpster.
This past week showcased the A+: The Young Designer’s Platform at Accent on Design/The New York International Gift Fair, and ‘new organics’ designer Stanley Ruiz was featured as one of the bright young stars on the design scene. You might recall that we featured Ruiz’s twig accessories right after New York Design Week in May, so we were excited to learn that he was selected to exhibit some of his latest creations at this week’s hugely popular venue. The Brooklyn designer artfully fuses craft, natural artifacts, and industrial design know-how to create sculptural objects that are grafted with new life and budding green promise.
The Miss Rio Ottoman is composed of an unlikely material that gives it its Nerf-esque pizazz and Koosh ball buoyancy: recycled Flip-Flops. Designer Karin Wittmann Wilsmann takes industrial leftovers from flip-flop factories to groups of local craftspeople in Brazil where the unprocessed material becomes Miss Rio Ottomans.
Recently we introduced you to Seattle’s Graypants Inc. and their beautiful line of sustainable Scrap Chairs. In the process of fine-tuning their creations, Seth and Jonathan were captivated by the interplay of light and shadows across the corrugations of their cardboard chair and decided to recast its surplus material as a series of stunning Scrap Lights. We love the way these luminous lanterns cast rippling rivulets of light through their corrugated seams, and their twice-recycled construction strikes us as a shining example of sustainable design at its finest.
Seraglia is a beautiful and ethical collection of romantic accessories, all hand-crafted in the UK by designer Lucy Wills. With a dedicated focus on environmental responsibility and genuine resourcefulness, Seraglia vintage pieces are made using antique and unusual reclaimed materials – all with the intention to (re)create long lasting, heirloom accessories for the modern, eco chic woman.
Earlier this week Cambridge, Canada welcomed a stunning new interactive sculpture that casts a shimmering set of lights against the night sky. Constructed atop a sun-dappled hill, Gorbet Design’s Solar Collector sweeps the skyline as a gracefully ascending corona of light-laced beams. The interactive installation serves as a conduit for both solar energy and creative input, soaking up sunlight and simple web-based controls throughout the day. Upon nightfall the installation synthesizes its stored reserves into a glimmering light show.
Paper is a marvelous material with a complex character – at times a vessel for banal documents and stale legalese, it is also capable of much more expressive forms with a bit of creativity. Case in point: these gorgeous recycled paper lamps recently released by Jordy Fu. Her cloud-sheathed creations break free from the two dimensional realm with dreamlike textures and elaborately layered wisps. Evoking the precise paper-cuts of Rob Ryan and Nikki Mcclure, Fu’s designs are made with a distinct style that is all her own.
The best work on display at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair this year came from student designers. BVD Collective, a student project from Appalachian State University, proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt by debuting a stunning collection of lighting fixtures made from recycled plastic utensils. Made from 100% post-consumer plastic utensils (yes, that means dirty forks collected from waste-bins), the ‘Waste Not’ line of lamps highlights just how elegant and inspired recycled design can be. The gorgeous Go Go Ghost table lamp (shown above), by Corey Daniels, is made from 121 recycled plastic knives collected over the course of countless BVD group lunches from a fried chicken restaurant.
In a world of shimmering polycarbonate chairs and seamlessly engineered surfaces, Brooklyn based Stanley Ruiz’s work is a breath of fresh air. Inspired by “walking, improv music, and Thoreau”, his New Organic Collection strikes a stunning balance between craft and industry. Composed of powder-coated steel and carefully selected twigs, the collection beautifully blends prefigured forms with raw materials.
If you are a coffee drinker with a hard-to-kick habit, you are probably all too aware of how many coffee stirrers are wasted at places like Starbucks every single day. Day in and day out, millions of these single-use sticks go straight into the garbage and off to the landfill after a quick 10-second swirl of cream or sugar. You may have even wondered – like we sure have: “Isn’t there something that we can do to get better use out of all these toss-away coffee stirrers?” Well we are happy to report that there finally is answer to the java-waste woes: Portuguese design group Studio Veríssimo has just debuted a gorgeous eco-luxe chandelier that not only provides a glimmer of hope for discarded coffee sticks, but also created quite a stir at the recent Touch | NY exhibition during New York Design Week.
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