Stackable Outdoor Furniture

With both larger and smaller versions available, two to four seats along with a coffee table all emerge from a single sphere or obelisk shape. The table alone sets this apart from most transforming/collapsing chair sets, but with the passable style and transforming functional of this set one could also imagine cramped interior spaces benefiting from one of these designs.

There is something unsightly about most stackable porch and patio furniture designs – cheap plastic that fits functionally, but not aesthetically, together into a single tower. This creative stacked furniture design from Dedon at least creates an object of visual interest, unobtrusive but present, when not used as chairs.

Scrap Metal Furniture

Bob Campbell, also known as Stig, as is much a metal sculptor as he is an industrial artist or furniture designer. Using scrap metal parts from cogs and wheels to chains and treads, he crafts recycled one-of pieces and furniture sets that use a creative combination of manufactured pieces and built-from-scratch shape.

He incorporates leather, wood and other industrial materials as needed but metal is always at the core of his work. He has sold his unique metal furniture pieces to all kinds of people through various venues, ranging from high-end luxury retail stores to music festivals, street markets and his own personal private gallery.

His work itself is open to interpretation but his unique style and curious material choices certainly set him up to be seen as existing somewhere between traditional arts and crafts and modern mechanical engineering.

My own words: This kind of interier design is interesting as furniture. If allowed to rust and oxidize perhaps it could create an inhanced quality to the piticular peace. Perhaps certain peaces of the sculpture could be subjected to rust creating and interesting effect? I also like the use of black leather agaist the brushed metal texture and the attention to detail is impressive.

Scandalous Interiers

Really, would these sinks make you stimulated … or strangely uncomfortable? Unfortunately, the designer’s thoughts are unknown is this was an anonymously submitted image that will surely make its rounds on the interwebs. Each piece was clearly individualy sculpted and the surrounding decor suggests an elegant setting – so really, it may have been a bold move to include such sexy (or at least scandalous) bathroom sinks in whatever location this may be.

My own thoughts:  I think this interier design move is interesting and I think designers these days are not pushing the boat out enough. This kind of decor makes venues different and gives the place a unique selling point.

Copper Coin Floors

A cheap-but-clever custom solution, using a penny as a floor tile makes a luxurious statement with ready-made pieces, but the legality of this alternate application by the Standard Hotel and Restaurant in New York City may be questionable.

Pennies are the notorious most useless part of American currency, so for the do-it-yourself folks this could work as a clever way to upcycle their dusty jars of these copper-coated discs by turning them into unique DIY tile with easy-to-design patterns. This also makes you wonder: what else could be reuse into tile for your home floors or as other forms of surface material? Already there are manufacturers creating recycled glass countertops, but there must be a lot of other standardized waste or cheap leftovers that could be used in new ways to save you the time and effort of buying and installing standard tile.

Light Transmitting Wood

If you thought that see-through concrete was a cool material innovation, this even more refined-looking wooden counterpart may dazzle you even more. And with the core technology now fully developed, the sky is the limit – virtually any material can be made to let light pass through it.

Sandwiched between wooden slats, the vertical strips that help light move from one face to the other are visible as tall thin bars – but like vertical pixels, the effect of the composite image is readily apparent as our minds stitch the image back together. The resulting high-tech hybrid material can be deployed in everything from structural walls to horizontal surfaces or room dividers.

Similar cutting-edge, light-transmitting fiber-optics as those that allow lights and shadows to penetrate concrete (pre-cast or poured on site) are used by Luminoso to carry light from one side to the other – making considerations of density and thickness obsolete. Just imagine: a warm and dark wooden wall providing physical and psychological solidity and security – but that also lets light shine through it.

Light Transmitting Concrete.

Concrete has a sometimes-bad reputation as a harsh, rigid, cold-to-the-touch and straight-edged material. Litracon is doing a great deal to change that image of concrete through a score of creative and sustainable applications for their patented light-transmitting concrete.

 Filled with optical fibers that run from one end of a poured piece of concrete to the other, these prefabricated blocks and panels effectively transmit light from one side to the other. Colors and light remain remarkably consistent from end to end, but with a natural variation from the pouring process that actually softens the effects considerably.

Temperature Changing Tiles

There is virtually no limit to what you can decorate with color-changing tiles (from Inventables). Daytime cityscapes turn into urban night scenes as the temperature in a room shifts. Notable applications include showers, floors and others surfaces likely to be exposed to temperature variations over time.

While some of these are simply colored and relatively inexpensive there are all kinds of untapped design potentials yet to be explored. Perhaps they would make a good interior design match for an exterior application of some light transmitting concrete.

Earthbag Structures

The phrase “form follows function” has morphed in meaning over time and is, perhaps rightly, open to interpretation. One interesting extension of this idea is that the form of a building can follow the functions of its constituent parts – that the visual result can reflect the process of construction and that this, in turn, makes the architecture more educational or “honest” – a way to learn the history of a building simply by taking a look at how it was made.

In addition to their do-it-yourself, easy-to-build and other sustainability-related benefits, “earth bag” homes – constructed of bags filled with local dirt, mud, sand and/or rock – are also potentially extremely expressive as works of design. Their structural properties and the ways in which they are stacked certainly preclude some design possibilities but they enable others.

 

The end product reflects not only the more universal properties of sand-and-dirt-built structures but also can indicate individual stylistic preferences and regional building practices. The final appearance is generally curved, organic and assymetrical – not things we are used to in home design – but invariably are anything but boring. All in all, they have a great deal of expressive potential for something so cheap, easy and fast to build – if nothing else as an eccentric guest house or secondary rural cabin.

Creative & Inovative Manhole Covers

The Map Hole concept is compelling in part due to its completeness. It takes advantage of the naturally-necessary distribution of manholes throughout a cityscape and makes them the basis for a mapping system. Moreover, the designer also proposes possible applications for amusement parks as well as the option of having ’sponsored listings’ for local businesses that would, in turn, yield revenue for further urban design improvements.

Though similar, this rainwater-powered guidance system takes things a step further (so to speak) – a  foot-activated display features information for the lost traveler at the push of a button, all sourced by hydroelectric-energy generated naturally via the flow of water through the streets.

They are everywhere – on every street in every major city, manholes dot the urban landscape. While these ubiquitous objects are essentially functional, some artists have found creative ways to add to their aesthetic and, more recently, certain designers

have come up with creative ways to add new uses and even generate passive eco-friendly power from their necessary presence.

Land Art

Nils-Udo-giant-stick-basket

For focus week I decided to pursue my interests in Land Art. I have always been interested in Land Art so I've selected several case studies that could be inspirational and benificial to my work. 

 Andrew Goldworthy

Inspirational art from Andrew Goldsworthy using  stones, rocks, trees, leaves and ice. 

My own words: I like what andrew goldsworthy has done with this collection of coloured leaves.

I like the princible of using natural material as art because the art itself is the environment.  An ice sculpture clinging to a tree which has been "trained" to form a sprial creates an interesting feature. 

 Patrick Dougherty

Dougherty’s works allude to nests, cocoons, hives,

 and lairs built by animals, as well as the [artificial] forms

 of huts, haystacks, and baskets, created by interweaving branches

and twigs together. Many of his works look ‘found’ rather than

made” Trained originally as a carpenter, Dougherty skipped

backward from the finished material of cut-and-dried wood straight

to the source: saplings grown, bent and built into magnificent

 works of natural and architectural sculpture. As part of this

 process his designs plan in elements of unpredictability, growth

 and eventual destruction – there is no attempt to maintain the

works beyond as certain point which are, eventually, left to

 return to natural states slowly and beautifully.

My words: The nature of the material he uses is palpable thus being able to bend and flex the wood to suit. This kind of construction is interesting and worth remembering for future ideas. His work is intentionally temporary and could easily be lost to nature if not maintained. Becuase of this, his work attaches a "sell by date" which makes it much more poignant.  

Patrick Dougherty's website

Other Landscape Art

The story of this strange land sculpture garden is almost

 as unusual as the curiously representational earth art found

within it. The so-called Lost Gardens of Heligan were once

overgrown, lost and forgotten but are now one of the most

 popular botanical gardens in the UK. One intrepid explorer

 took it upon himself to locate, uncover and restore the gardens

 to their former glory. To the amazement of locals the then-unused

land was brought back to full flower and became a significant

 boon for the local economy – the mud man and moss maiden shown above being also restored in the process.

My Words: I like these sculptures because they demonstrate the kinds of creativity you can fabricate out of the natural environment.

Growing Buildings

 My own words:  This kind of construction appeals to me because I find its a very pure type of construction. I like the resourceful'ness and how the artist can still turn to nature to make something aw-inspiring.  The vision of making a structure composed of basic natural materials become sensational architecture, is truly creditable.

Bench Art

What starts with an underlying functional form in the work of artist Pablo Reinoso often gets carried away as his furniture pieces begin to take on lives of their own. The crawling tendrils and stretched figures that emerge are rendered all the more exotic by his defiant use of hard wood with soft organic forms.

This designer is perhaps most well known for his remarkable wooden spaghetti benches in which the normal ends of wood slats become the beginning of a seemingly living form that twists and turns away from the conventional shape of the bench itself – and just imagine what an outdoor version of this bench would look like against, for example, an ivy-covered brick wall.