We’ve seen designers recycle airplane parts to create desks, tropical eco-hotels and a hostel, and now we can add couches and beds to the lofty collection! MotoArt is a team of designers who transform airplane parts into sleek, highly polished modern pieces of furniture. Based in Los Angeles, the 6 person design crew creates an impressive line-up of upcycled furnishings, sure to please every airplane enthusiast’s flight of fancy.
We all know that food and water are basic human needs, but what about something as simple as a place to sit? Right now, there is a pressing need for nearly 2 billion basic, low-cost seating units for schools hospitals and houses in underdeveloped countries around the globe. In response to the shortage, students Alon Tal and Fabio Alvarez teamed up with Zilca, a company that specializes in recycled materials, to find a solution. First presented last September at design fair Habitat Valencia in Spain, their senior thesis, the Reverse Project, makes cushions from re-purposed car foam for seating that is easy on the eyes, earth, and the behind!
Argentinean architects Gustavo Dieguez and Lucas Gilardi of Estudio a77 transformed an existing 1950s house on a small lot in an upscale neighborhood of Buenos Aires into an innovative eco-friendly dwelling. Constructed from recycled and reclaimed materials, this ‘demolition house’ turns trash into a treasured abode. Using approximately 50 meters of recycled highway guard rails from the General Paz (a highway surrounding Buenos Aires) and 300 meters of discarded metal profiles, wood, iron doors and windows found in scrap yards, Dieguez and Gilardi rework demolition materials into fully functioning structural elements.
Last week, millions of TV sets became obsolete, all due to the switch from analog to digital television. So, what does an eco-minded individual do with an old, ugly, lead and toxin filled box? Well, throwing it away is not an option! You could always recycle your old television — but that doesn’t quite do the trick, does it? What is a true green geek to do? Thanks to Make Magazine, we now have a few, very clever ideas for repurposing your defunct boob tube.
Here’s a project that will get any weekend warrior excited, especially one tackling the tear-down and installation of a new fence. Occupying a footprint of no more than 8’ x 10’ this little studio/shed in Petaluma, CA was made from rain-screen siding and reclaimed redwood fencing. Plenty of daylight makes it to the interior space thanks to a simple polycarbonate clearstory, and the interior is …
Barbie Foosball!!!! Need we say more?
Now you can combine your collection of Barbies and your love for foosball all in one bizarre table game! Using Barbies as the players, French designer Chloe Ruchon has created the BarbieFoot, a completely operable Foosball table. It recently debuted at the DMY Youngsters Exhibition in Berlin, with the intention of presenting a traditionally masculine toy in a feminine way. We’re not sure if …
As one of Tel Aviv’s most thought-provoking new companies, Junktion, a young, edgy and innovative design studio, is breathing new life into the trash their city has cast aside. Junktion began in 2008 and has made their presence know in the contemporary furniture market with their unique approach to function and unwavering conviction to challenge how people regard junk.
Simple yet clever, we’re raising our glasses to the inventive repurposing behind the Re-Juicer. The Re-Juicer turns an orange into OJ with the twist of a wrist and a plastic water bottle. Another cheeky product from New York designer and founder of Amron Experimental, Scott Amron, the Re-Juicer is made from the bottom part of a Poland Springs water bottle. Because of the bottle’s inherent flexibility, it easily bends …
London-born designer Tom Price was commissioned by Arts Co. to produce a piece of work for ‘From Now to Eternity’, an exhibition celebrating design, and focusing on plastic as a versatile material. Addressing concerns over our increasing piles of wasted throw-away plastic products, he chose to create an ingenious series of chairs formed by strategically melting piles of polyester fleece.
If you just can’t get enough of computer keyboards during the work day, the Text-ile chair might be for you. Created by designers Dante Bonnucelli and Lamm for UMUL 2009 (Use More, Use Less), a workshop focusing on re-use in design, Text-ile is made out of discarded computer keyboards. It may not be your ‘type’ of lounge chair, but we dig the concept.
Office furniture often gets sent to die in a dark, damp landfill, where it remains for much longer than we care to admit. It tends to be cheap, molded, made from particle board and sometimes includes formaldehyde. Since we can’t unmake these items, the next best thing is to recycle them into useful pieces of eco-furniture, just like Naomi Dean does. Dean is a UK-based furniture designer who finds inspiration in smart design and cast-off items like unwanted office furniture.
We’ve all heard of pieces of furniture that act as conversation pieces, but how about a table that not only starts conversations but actually looks like a giant speech bubble? Brilliant! Constructed entirely of scrap pieces of cardboard, Leo Kempf’s conversation table is sturdy, witty, and an excellent option if you’re looking for a coffee table that will get your guests talking every time they come over.
We’re perpetually amazed by the way that Japanese designer Daisuke Hiraiwa transforms everyday objects into striking examples of found design, and we were particularly impressed with his incredible line of Indication chandeliers - made from recycled plastic spoons. Exhibited at this year’s ICFF, each one is completely composed of clear plastic spoons that have been punctured with hundreds of tiny holes to allow light to filter through them in beautiful ways.
Designed by Mario Bellini for Meritalia, an Italian furniture maker, the Via Lattea furniture line looks like a collection of homemade marshmallows. Light as air, these chairs and couches are made from steel mesh combined with recycled fiber sacks formerly used to transport grain, stones, and sugar. Bellini and Meritalia showed their new line this year at the Milan Furniture Fair and we’re fascinated by the glowing chairs and air-filled sacs.
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 live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!
For the sake of sustainability, we normally hope that our furniture will last a long time in an effort to conserve resources and energy. Ate Atema of Atema Architecture, however, ponders whether this philosophy is truly the correct path to eco-enlightenment. With his Auto-Cannibalistic Table, which is intended to be a temporary object, he embraces sustainability in a less conventional way. The table was constructed with paper egg cartons and wheatpaste glue, which is made from flour and water, and then planted with herbs. The herbs can be picked as they grow, creating a place where food can both be eaten as well as grown–over time, however, the plants are intended to “eat away” at the table.
Designed by Daisuke Hiraiwa, these elegant echidna-esque Stamen chandeliers elevate an everyday material into brilliant expressions of found design. Each one is created by gluing hundreds of toothpicks together to form a flexible disc that gives their bristling points a fluid form. The pointillist pendant lamps recently debuted at ICFF 2009, where they wowed onlookers with their complex folding curves and innovative use of materials.
Made from stacked rings of corrugated cardboard, Graypants‘ pendant Scrap Lights (which we’ve long admired) are a prime example of the transformative power of good design. The ceiling lamps‘ elegant construction utilizes leftover scraps of cardboard to create a semi-translucent shade that gives off a muted, soft glow. The overall effect is elegant, understated and as far from trash as you could possibly get.
If you’re in NYC for Design Week, we deeply urge you to stop by InDisposed, the cooler, less corporate little brother of the giant International Contemporary Furniture Fair. An offsite design exhibition taking place at Studio-X, InDisposed aims to explore and possibly debunk the idea our society has lately adopted that disposable = evil. “After all,” reads their brief, “are disposable objects inherently bad? Doesn’t disposability have some redeeming social value?” From an auto-cannibalistic table to lego-shaped plastic takeout containers that you can build furniture out of when you are done eating from them, the objects at the show have that fresh, experimental quality that occurs when designers create for the sake of creating rather than when they are stressed to make something sellable. Read on to see what we loved most about InDisposed!
Designed by Evan Dublin, this brightly-hued slide chair is sure to give any room a brilliant pop of color. A slick example of found design, the chair is crafted from a deconstructed playground set reclaimed from a New York City salvage yard. Evan set the slide on end, upholstered it with cushy padding, and finished it with a wood base for a playful …
It seems like almost every community has a skate park–a place for the youngins’ to go, try out some sick tricks, and hang out with friends. City officials like them because they keep kids off the streets, and kids like them because they provide an adult-free haven where kids can be on their own. But despite their appeal, skate parks are basically empty swimming pools, made almost entirely out of concrete, and do nothing to reduce urban heat island effect or filter stormwater. Now, however, skate park designers are starting to incorporate greener features and nature into their designs. Read on to see how projects like the Ed Benedict Skate Plaza in Portland, Oregon are leading the charge.
Like an MC Escher optical illusion this incredible rug is not quite as it first appears - on one hand it appears to be a 3D wooden sculpture, and on the other it is a fluid textile. Designed by Elisa Stroyzk, a design student at Central Saint Martins in London, the rug is made from wood veneer offcuts bonded to a textile backing. Inspired by her materials and using them in new ways, Stroyzk blurs the reality between hard surfaces and fluid movement.
One of our favorite finds at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair were these beautiful modular felt One Cut stools by Swedish designer Britta Teleman. Each one is composed of a stack of matching pieces of felt that once assembled becomes a set of design-savvy, comfy furniture to sit on. The felt of each stool is cut into different shapes and colors allowing the owner to mix and match each layer, building their personalized stool.
Lots of up-and-coming and established designers will present new collections at BKLYN Designs this weekend, and we don’t want to miss a single, solitary piece of work—which is why we love getting an advanced look at what’s to come! Bill Higendorf, co-founder of Brooklyn–based furniture company Uhuru Design, sent us a sneak peak of the three new locally and sustainably produced designs he and partner Jason Horvath are debuting at BKLYN Designs this week. While they’re every bit as functional as Uhuru’s previous products, the limited edition Stitched Table, Standard Chair and Metal Stoolen have a little added oomph that sets them apart.
This incredible reclaimed pavilion defies the old “everything but” cliché - it is entirely made of kitchen sinks. Built by 2012 Architechten in cooperation with Jeanne van Heeswijks of Jeanneworks, the structure has risen up as a stainless steel castle tower amidst the traditional architecture of Utrecht, Vlaardingen and Amsterdam. An inventive example of reclaimed construction, the Sustainable Sky Box serves as a multi-purpose space for cultural activities.
We’ve seen quite a bit of experimentation with cardboard on Inhabitat, but Hungarian husband & wife team Edith Szilvasy (formerly an artist) and Andras (Andrew) Balogh (a carpenter) have taken cardboard building to the next level by inventing a system of constructing furniture that uses only cardboard and ordinary paper clips. The development of the system has taken 3 years, but for Karton Art Design, that time has been time well spent. Andras developed a a method of folding and clipping the cardboard so that their finished products are as strong as wood and as light as paper — and can be integrated with existing wood products. Their work is currently showcasing at the Milan Furniture Fair in La Zona Tortona this week. Karton’s products featured at the fair include: shelving units, chairs, and even a restored hutch (featured below).
Designer Nicolas Cheng of Studioroom906 is presenting this beautiful set of stationary made from recycled eggshells at the Milan Furniture Fair this week. In his “Childhood Memories” collection, Cheng uses wasted eggshells that undergo a “high pressure technique” to create a new material that utilizes the existing proteins and mineral crystals from the shells. 100 recycled eggshells are used per set which includes a pencil, pencil holder, eraser and A5 paper.
Drink and be merry - the bottles you leave behind have a new life ahead of them. The Green Glass Company of Wisconsin takes used and unwanted bottles from wineries and has created a diverse collection of glassware that’s fun and chic. The tops of bottles are twisted off to form goblets while their lower halves are transformed into matching tumblers. No glass is wasted and the process is done with the environment in mind.
DRUMROLL PLEASE…
Spring has sprung, the votes have been cast, and we’re excited to announce the winners of our Spring Greening DIY Design Contest! We feel fortunate to have such an incredibly talented reader base - you guys wowed us with some truly impressive examples of DIY design. Thanks to everyone for submitting their incredible Spring Greening projects, and to all our readers for supporting them throughout the voting process… read on for our winners…
We were glad to see that we’re not the only ones that, upon unpackaging our shiny new macbook, thought it was such a shame to use such a lovely case just for packaging material. Rather than ditching or storing the quite useful cardboard box, Spring Greening finalist …
Another inspiring finalist in our Spring Greening Contest is Kumvana Gomani, who created this beautiful little bird brooch from recycled aluminum. To make it she took an aluminum can, flattened it, cut out the shape, sanded the aluminum and finally attached a pin or hair clasp. Gomani is based in Sweden, and her creative use of recycled materials makes for some adorable jewelry - check out her crystalized leaf necklace made from recycled plastic bottles as well. Our polls close today, so make sure you vote now for your favorite DIY Design!
SPRING GREENING CLOSES TONIGHT at MIDNIGHT!
Our Spring Greening Design Contest closes at midnight tonight, which makes this your LAST CHANCE to cast your vote for your favorite DIY design! As our fifteen incredible finalists enter the final round of voting the competition is thick and we currently have several stunning projects closing in on our grand prize of a $200 gift certificate to the Inhabitat Shop in addition to all of the fame and fortune of being showcased on Inhabitat. We’ll also be selecting three runner-ups to receive an eggling of their choice, so be sure cast your vote today in support of your favorite example of DIY design, and stay tuned for the reveal of our grand prize winner this week!
San Francisco’s James Sampayan offers up a bright idea for the Spring Greening DIY Contest that combines old and new to create a lovely pendant lamp that gives the lowly light bulb a second life during which to “live long and prosper.” James’ design snaps ten standard bulbs between two acrylic plates along with a single CFL bulb that illuminates the rest. Simply crafted using bulbs, scrap acrylic, and miscellaneous Ace Hardware bits and bobs, this pendant is functional and economical. If you’re a fan of this design, be sure to vote for it in our contest post!
If you have fantasies of living like the Swiss Family Robinson or even the characters in Lost, this rainforest resort near Quepos, Costa Rica may be just the ticket. Situated on the edge of the Manuel Antonio National Park, the Costa Verde Resort features an incredible hotel suite set inside a 1965 Boeing 727 airplane. In its former life the airplane transported globetrotters on South Africa Air and Avianca Airlines, and it now serves as a two bedroom suite perched on the edge of the rainforest overlooking the beach and ocean.
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