greg lynn: recycled toy furniture.

While trolling the blogs today I found these re-used toy tables on Dezeen. Designed by California-based architect Greg Lynn, his series of recycled toy furniture won Golden Lion for the Best Installation Project in the International Exhibition at the Vienna Architecture Biennale.

While it’s pretty clear these aren’t recycled toys, I still think this works beautifully as a piece, almost more as an installation. And the idea is still true – you could use recycled toys in this fashion. I guess the line is a little grey, but I don’t care. They look hot. They’re big and shiny and plastic and colourful and have been melted together in a little toy-pyre and made into table. I likes.

anna garforth: mossenger.

UK designer Anna Garforth has gone above and beyond green-washing to create a truly biodegradable and all natural graffiti. With “Mossenger” she’s created living, breathing, and sustainable outdoor art. Fashioned from a common moss that thrives on brick walls, she took a quote from poet Eleanor Stevens, carved the moss, and glued it to the wall with a mix of totally biodegradable ingredients.

As the moss grows it will begin to spread out and the words themselves will literally spread themselves, in all their green glory, across the wall and melt into a field of green. Part of an on-going project experimenting with public space and street art, I’m majorly interested to see what Garforth will be up to next. Perhaps the next lines of the poem will strategically find themselves on walls across the city?

Via It’s Nice That

mathieu lehanneur: flood restaurants.

In his ground-breaking new interiour design for Paris’ Flood Restaurants, visionary designer Mathieu Lehanneur has taken the integration of ecology and experiential design to new heights.

Sleek round aquariums sit throughout the space, each filled with 100-litres of Spirulina Plantesis. The micro algae creates oxygen through photosynthesis, aided by the large bright windows nearby. Besides their eye-popping futuristic vibe and awesome visual quality – the aquariums seem to almost glow with an organic phosphoresence – the pure, fresh oxygen they release into the air adds to a full-sensory, holistic experience. The design goes beyond what you can touch and see to improving the environment of the very atmosphere inside the space. You may not be able to consciously sense it, but undoubtedly your body will know.

I love the pure, retro-minimalist feel of the entire design. Besides the algae aquariums, Lehanneur dip-coated all the chairs and tables in PVC to give them an ultra-smooth, wet touch to the skin. The lighting takes the oxygenated concept even further – each fixture has an atmospheric, almost molecular look to it. As if each one is about to burst with air or float away.

Via Snell at Lost At E Minor.

svalbard global seed vault.

It’s been evident to me for quite some time now that Scandinavia will eventually save the world from a self-imposed doom. For proof, look no further than the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Officially up and running as of February 26, 2008, the vault is built into the permafrost of Spitsbergen Island in the very remote arctic Svalbard Archipelago (we’re talking only 1,120 kilometres from the North Pole remote… like, Santa might work there in the off-season remote…). Even cooler (literally), the vault sits deep inside a 120-metre long reinforced concrete tunnel built into the side of a sandstone mountain, behind two solid steel doors, and remote-controlled by a manned-outpost in Sweden. This shit is on lock down.

You KNOW that Dr. Claw’s secret lair is underneath this thing. But wait! It gets better…

As it’s name implies, the vault can hold up to 2 billion seeds from 4.5 million species from around the world. At the opening ceremony last week, 100 million seeds were placed inside. The seeds are kept in foil packets at -18˚ Celsisus and if undisturbed are expected to be usable for thousand of years. Called a “frozen garden of Eden” by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, it’s mission is to preserve crop supplies and secure biological diversity. Though most people, myself included, like to think that the seed vault will help us grow bamboo and spelt and other protein-rich grains as we slowly re-populate the planet following some sort of apocalypse, it’s really more likely that it will supply replacement seeds when other gene banks around the world have equipment failures, fires, natural disasters… you know, boring stuff that doesn’t involve a 1000 foot tidal wave rushing towards the Eastern seaboard at the speed of sound.

They’ve covered all their bases with this one. The location was chosen because of it’s almost total lack of tectonic movement and the permafrost conditions pretty much create the ideal refrigerator. The location, 130 metres above sea level, will not flood even if the polar ice-caps melt. All of the seeds are organic and GMO free (despite the fact that it’s just smart, genetically modified seeds are basically sterile… another reason why we shouldn’t be messing with nature) and even if the air-conditioning system fails, now that the vault has reached it’s ideal frozen temperature, it’s estimated it would take 200 years before the temperature would rise enough to harm the seeds.

Though most of the building costs were fronted by the government of Norway, a lot of eyebrows have been raised by some of the other groups with a financial interest in the vault, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and US agri-business giant DuPont. Though you could argue that an agricultural company has an inherent interest to preserve seeds, this big-business connection has conspiracy theorists all over the net going off their rockers. The Zeitgeisters are all pretty sure Bill Gates is going to stock all the seeds in the world, poison the rest, and then enslave all of humankind into some kind of nutritional feudal state. If you want to read a more balanced view on the possible evils behind the whole thing, check out this post at the Rasta Seed Project.

agata jaworska: made in transit + gropak.

One of my favourite things in the world are those Boston leaf lettuces – the ones that come with the little piece of moist dirt wrapped around the roots so that the lettuce is actually still growing a little. Despite the fact that it’s travelled from Boston in a plastic box, it tastes fresher and more alive than something that’s been totally separated from it’s growth source.

I’m also assuming Boston lettuce comes from Boston, but that could be a big assumption.

An evolution in the growing idea of sustainability during transit is the Gropak for Made in Transit. Designed by Poland-born, Canada-raised, and now Netherlands-based designer Agata Jaworska, this packaging prototype is designed so that the oyster mushrooms inside would actually grow during shipping and be harvested by the consumer just before eating. Fresh. We all know, even though we don’t like to think about it, that food slowly starts to die as soon as it’s harvested, so Made in Transit looks at ways to create growth during the entire supply chain process.

Agata’s a little bit brilliant, and she’s even got a funky little vid to explain the whole scheme behind Made in Transit:

tappening: i’d tap that.

It’s definitely one of the biggest branding successes of the last 25 years that we’ve been led to believe we should spend $15 billion a year on something that, for most of us, shoots out of a faucet in the kitchen for free.

Did you know that Evian is launching bagged oxygen in 2008? It’s better than regular oxygen because it comes in a sky-coloured bag telling you it’s from the Alps and it has extra purity molecules. Sounds moronic doesn’t it? I’ve got news for you…

Enter the green crusaders at Tappening. Their site is jammed with alarming facts about the damage done to the environment and the economy by the bottled water industry. (For example – 40% of bottled water is just tap water put in a bottle). Not only that, but they’ve also got these totally hip reusable water bottles. You can spread the word while still looking as cool… and since looking cool is mostly what the bottled water industry is about, what better way to undermine how ludicrous it is than right at the source.

breathing earth.

Thankfully it is now Friday. That means that before skulking off at 3:00 pm to drown the sorrows that were created by Monday through Thursday, it is now time for Random Website Friday. This week’s random site is Breathing Earth.

Created by David Bleja, the site breaks down – by each country on the planet – the number of tonnes of C02 released into the atmosphere each minute as well as the current birth and death tolls from the moment you log in. Interesting – yes. Morbid – perhaps. However, it has enabled me to tell you that in the time it took me to write this post 1123 people were born and 530 died around the world. I just hope none of them were in my building, because sirens freak me out a bit.