The beautiful thing about upcycled materials is that the end results often bear no resemblance to the original items. Such is the case with sculptor Kris Kuksi’s toy sculptures, which are constructed out of old toys, statues, and mechanical parts.
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.
MOVIE REVIEW: The Yes Men Fix the World
by Moe Beitiks, 11/02/09
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.
For most people, bicycles represent a means of transportation, a fun activity, or even objects of affection. For David Byrne they’re much more – they offer a unique opportunity to experience the culture, history, and vitality contained within our built environment. Due for release today, Bicycle Diaries is a freewheeling travelogue that finds Byrne pedaling through the cities of the world as he expounds upon architecture, infrastructure, and life within the world’s great cities.
Found Cutlery Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
Spanish designer Oscar Diaz has found a new way to rescue our Earth from discarded plastic bottles. In a series called “Found” the designer has cleverly produced a range of super-light flatware cut straight from the bottle. Each fork, knife and spoon assumes the bottles’ shapely angles and curves and feature an ergonomically designed grip that makes them as easy to pick up from the table as any other cutlery.
Habitat Machines: David Trautrimas’s Amazing Art
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.
ECO LANDS: SF’s Outside Lands Festival Grows a Green Heart
This past weekend the Outside Lands festival rocked San Francisco, drawing thousands of people to bask in the sunshine and music that filled Golden Gate Park. Greening an event as massive as a festival is no easy task, however one of the cornerstones of this year’s event was the PG&E sponsored Eco Lands, which created a verdant heart within the festival’s central meadow From a solar stage juiced by the sun’s rays, to an on-site organic farmers market, to an innovative array of recycling programs, read on for a review of Eco Lands’ greatest green merits.
Buddha Sculpture Made from 20,000 Dead Bugs
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.
Recycled Skateboard Stools Transform Thrashed Boards to Treasure
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.
EDIBLE ART: Biodegradable Bowls Made From Vegetables
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.
Ladonia: A Micronation Made of Driftwood and Nails
Looking for a change of scenery? Consider moving to Ladonia, a micronation made up of driftwood, nails, and nine-story wooden “fortresses” located in the southwest corner of Sweden. Designed by Lars Vilks, the mock nation consists of two works of art: Nimis, a maze of 70 tons of driftwood and nails, and Arx, a stone and concrete sculpture that looks like a melting sandcastle.
David Stark’s Incredible Recycled Cardboard Creations
A new West Elm store opened up in Manhattan last week, and the opening gala featured an incredible collection of one-of-a-kind cardboard furnishings crafted by acclaimed designer and event producer David Stark. Constructed from recycled West Elm packaging materials and catalogs, the objects were auctioned off in a silent auction with all the proceeds going to the Cooper Hewitt Museum, a museum devoted to historic and contemporary design.
ECO ART: Toilet Paper Roll Cut-Outs
Yuken Teryua’s work proves that discarded everyday objects can be re-invented into something elegant and beautiful. The Japanese artist crafts toilet paper rolls with a level of detail so that they adopt a new identity as delicately sculpted pieces — reminiscent of columnar wind chimes intertwined in the branches of a tree. The Japanese artist has also used shopping bags and old pizza boxes in his collection of work that uses recycled materials to defy the defined roles of these objects.
ECO ART: The Toaster Project
What would inspire an artist to attempt to build a toaster from scratch? Perhaps a quote from Douglas Adams?
“Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.” – Douglas Adams from his book Mostly Harmless.
So industrial production inspired by Douglas Adams — can’t go wrong. At least, not in theory. Logistically, it turns out, you can go very, very wrong, as Thomas Thwaites proves in his work for the art exhibition BOOM at the Royal College of Art in London. It’s called the Toaster Project, and it follows the artist as he attempts to construct a toaster, from sourcing the materials to piecing them all together. Not too hard, right? Or perhaps it is, as Thwaites found out.
MELTING MEN Eco Art Calls Attention to Global Warming
Ice melts. Simple, yes, and yet it seems to be one of those seminal issues of our time. Ice is melting, in a big, thundering, shuddering, streaming-down way, and it’s making polar bears swim longer, dissolving Arctic villages, and making the hunt difficult. Similar to the army of melting penguins from 50graus.org, Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo’s art installation of frozen men brings the Arctic ice melt to the equator, metaphorically speaking. Showcasing a multitude of thought-provoking figures carefully sculpted out of ice, these men seem to sit in contemplation as the midday heat slowly erodes their bodies.
China’s Next Great Wall: An Interview With Simone Giostra
Earlier this year, Inhabitat covered GreenPIX , Simone Giostra’s groundbreaking Zero Energy Media Wall in Beijing. Recently ScribeMedia Arts & Culture released an excellent interview where the architect explains how he pitched the proposal to the client and developed the concept and installation. Giostra describes the GreenPIX wall as a form of “dynamic architecture” made of “hardware, software and content”.
STRANDBEEST: Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Sculptures
It’s not every day that you run across an entirely new strain of life, which is exactly what Dutch kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen has created. His Strandbeests are wondrous wind-powered automatons that exhibit an incredibly lifelike dexterity as they cascade in flowing waves down seaside sands. The elegantly articulated creatures are constructed using genetic algorithms and are constantly evolving to better suit their environment.
Bird, Bat and Bee Houses from Up-cycled Catalogues
In a bid to creatively recycle waste materials, London auction house Phillips de Pury & Company has partnered with Adventure Ecology to invite a list of international artists, designers and architects to “up-cycle” the auction house’s waste catalogues and packaging into new habitats for the declining numbers of bird, bat and bee species in urban environments.
Amazing Green Roof Art School in Singapore
If art school was in our future we might opt to study under, or on top of, the amazing green roof at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This 5 story facility sweeps a wooded corner of the campus with an organic, vegetated form that blends landscape and structure, nature and high-tech and symbolizes the creativity it houses.
SUSTAINABLE STYLE SUNDAY: Alyson Fox’s A Small Collection
It’s true that good things sometimes come in small packages, and Alyson Fox’s ‘A Small Collection‘ is no exception. The Austin-based photographer, illustrator, and innovative clothing designer has come up with a home-brewed recipe for eco-style and one-of-a-kind mix and match separates that defies the clotheshorse instinct. As an art director and storyteller extraordinaire, Fox has created a pint-sized collection that not only exemplifies a resourceful use of sustainable materials and recycled swatches, but also demonstrates that a streamlined collection of key pieces is all that one needs to flaunt one’s personal style.
THE ABANDONED BUILDING
Bruni/Babarit, the French odd couple of site-specific earth art, are currently exhibiting their most recent tour de force in Fert?-Bernard, France. Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit are artistic partners with a unique motivation and a stunning execution. The current exhibition, entitled The Abandoned Building, challenges the viewer to adopt a new perspective on the seeming meaninglessness of abandoned spaces.
The artists lay out two primary aspects of the work: architecture and ecology. The building itself is full of empty space and surrounded by fallow land; its historical function has faded. But the architecture takes on new meaning as vegetation is ushered in by neglect.
STEREOLUZ
Now that speaker design has gotten all high-tech, are you feeling nostalgic for the wooden boxes of yesteryear? If you are like me and harbor a fondness for the boxy design of old hi-fi speakers (but not the scratchy sound quality), you can recycle yours into beautiful ambient lights like this one, with custom lighting design company Stereoluz.
Lighting designer Trey Gerfers began reappropriating old speaker boxes in 2003 to create interactive ambient lights. He founded Stereoluz to keep up with the growing demand for his custom lamps, which now incorporate a variety of designs and materials in addition to the original speaker boxes. In some of his designs Gerfer uses old maps ? in others he uses wood paneling or LEDs. Although these may sound like an incongruous bunch of materials, once you see the lamps, you realize how well they work together. His motto is “old and new, modern and rustic, familiar but altogether something else” Sums it up about right.
HOTEL FOX
Everyone is drawing on the walls at Hotel Fox?at least everyone who is someone in the world of urban art, graphic design and illustration. Situated in the heart of Copenhagen, the sixty-one rooms have been individually (and stunningly) painted, creating a boutique hotel unlike any other.
Each room has its own character and its own story. Like room #408, by Hort, where the walls are drenched in a graphic green forest. Or room #209 (pictured above), by the French designers Antoine et Manuel, where everything is about chance.
LOS ANGELES’ BLACK HOLE
You could argue it’s astrophysically impossible to have a black hole within a black hole (we kid, we kid, LA peeps). Nonetheless, architects Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues (from Materials & Applications) have managed to reconstruct a featherweight rendition of “the deadliest force in the Universe” as a shade structure which hovers over M&A’s office on Silverlake blvd in Los Angeles. The shiny Mylar vortex has been slowing down traffic in front of 1619 Silverlake Blvd, as passersby stop to get a better look.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
