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Soft Maps: Wrap Up & Keep Warm with Way-Finding Quilts

dornob dornob — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:47:37 +0000

They say a stitch in time saves nine … so what does a stitch in space do for you? These hand-crafted maps mark out cities and neighborhoods in a way you can feel, touch or even wrap yourself inside, providing aid to the visually impaired and a perfect urban companion for everyday picnic goers.

Designed by Brooklyn’s Haptic Lab, each can be personalized and customized with names and dates as well as key locations and territories marked out on a particular regional cloth, combining objective and subjective maps of spaces and places.

From warming wraps for the Windy City to quilts covering Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, New York and Paris, the designs vary in size as well as usage. Some are made to be queen-or-king-sized covers, others baby blankets, and still others hanging tapestries.

Each, of course, can double as a cute play surface for children with building blocks or other tiny toys (turned giant-sized on the miniature-by-comparison city blocks, streets and parks). The off-the-shelf pieces are made mostly from 100% cotton and select wool blends, and come with a variety of color choices for background fabrics, string and yarn.

The post Soft Maps: Wrap Up & Keep Warm with Way-Finding Quilts first appeared on Dornob.

Subset Creates Murals to Highlight Homeless Crisis in Dublin

sorchaohiggins — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:00:23 +0000

Dublin’s housing crisis has reached an all-time high. Rents have been rising steadily in the Irish capital ever since 2014, when the city truly began to recover from the economic recession of 2008. Today, it’s cheaper to pay a mortgage there than it is to pay rent. Because there’s no longer enough housing stock to go around, landlords are having a field day, and Airbnb has started overtaking potential long-term units to make them available for short-term, transitory residents.

One of the most pronounced results of this, and an issue that has plagued Dublin since long before the recession, is widespread homelessness. There are currently around 9,900 homeless people in Ireland, and nearly 4,000 of them are children. In times of crises such as these, there is one powerful weapon being wielded by the country’s humanitarian community: street art.
The street art collective Subset has been painting large-scale murals around Dublin for a number of years now, but their “Grey Area Project” has a three-fold mission: to decorate the vacant walls of the city with colorful and thought-provoking pieces, to protest the city council’s strict regulation of street art, and to draw attention to the current housing crisis. The murals, which are created by a variety of different artists from Dublin, are on walls that have prominent locations in the city but have previously been overlooked, and they’ve been instrumental in raising awareness and holding the authorities to account.

One of their most to-the-point pieces is entitled “No Place Like Homeless” and rests squarely in the city center. This particular mural was done by the collective in advance of their Grey Area Project Exhibition II fundraiser, which was held in the Dublin Docklands in October of 2018. The exhibition featured a number of murals painted on the walls of a shopping center that was never occupied with tenants after its completion during the recession.

Today, the center hosts several public events and markets, but for the brief period of time that Subset took over the building, each guest was charged a €30 entrance fee, which also covered the cost of a magazine documenting the project and food, drink, and entertainment for the evening. Once inside, patrons had the option to purchase t-shirts and prints by the artists, each of which cost another €30. All of the proceeds from the night were donated to the Inner City Helping Homeless (ICHH) organization.

Subset hopes to continue highlighting the plight of homeless people in a city where the wealth gap is constantly growing greater all the time. Not only are they raising money for an incredible cause, but they’re also painting amazing murals that brighten up the city and giving artists a space to truly express themselves. So far, Subset has raised over €12,500 for ICHH from the sale of tickets, prints, t-shirts, and caps.

The post Subset Creates Murals to Highlight Homeless Crisis in Dublin first appeared on Dornob.

What Is a Dynamic Street?

Phil Roberts — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:00:55 +0000

For over a decade now, it’s been pretty obvious that new technology has been moving into our daily lives like a flood, showing up in areas where we want it and ruining places where it’s less welcomed. Still, we’ve already become used to responsive websites, apps, clothing, vehicles, and buildings, so it should come as no surprise that somebody has now thought to invent responsive streets — or at least a responsive set of modular pavers that can be used to make up a “dynamic street.”

We have Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), an international firm based in Torino, Italy, to thank for the technology behind dynamic streets. The firm has extensively studied the ways sensors and other devices can be integrated into the physical surfaces we interact with as part of our daily lives. CRA’s outstanding track record is exactly why Alphabet’s subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, reached out to them to create a modular paving system that could be used to change the function of certain streets. The prototype was first put on display in July of 2018 in Toronto, where Sidewalk Labs is planning to build an entire digital community. CRA and Sidewalk Labs wanted to use this prototype to see exactly how people would interact with a street that responded to their immediate needs.

By “dynamic,” CRA means that the system can be reconfigured whenever needed. For example, a dynamic street could be used as a one-way street in one direction for morning rush hour, turned into a two-way street for the rest of the day, and then be reconfigured as a one-way street in the opposite direction for evening rush hour. Some days, that same street could even become pedestrian or cyclist only. This would allow public events like outdoor festivals, live concerts, and block parties to much more easily be held on those streets.

Each paver is hexagonal in shape but flat in form, allowing vertical objects such as bollards for bike lanes or electrical equipment from city workers to be plugged in wherever necessary. At the center of every paver is a light that can be used to establish lanes for traffic, crosswalks, bike lanes, parking indicators, loading zones, and traffic flow. For now, the pavers are made of wood, but once they get out of the prototype phase, the company hopes to make them out of concrete. In a winter city like Toronto, with cars driving on snow tires, snow removal dump trucks pushing large steel shovels, and rivers of de-icing substances being poured out onto the streets, their material will have to be particularly tough.

On his firm’s website, CRA’s founding partner and chairman Carlo Ratti reminds us that dynamic streets are a logical progression in urban technology. “As autonomous vehicles are likely to start running on streets soon, we can start to imagine a more adaptable road infrastructure.”

Do we need dynamic streets? It depends on the context and the climate. It may be more practical in a digital first community like the one Sidewalk Labs wants to build in Toronto, but it probably wouldn’t be very practical on an established city street unless every street in that city became dynamic. Also, it kind of seems like the type of technology that would work better in a place like Ontario, California than it would in Ontario, Canada. Yet if Sidewalk Labs and CRA can make it work in Toronto, then maybe they can make it work anywhere.

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LA Streets Painted White to Beat the Heat

Cassie L. Damewood — Thu, 24 May 2018 13:00:29 +0000

In recent years, visitors and residents alike have been complaining considerably more often about the summer heat in Los Angeles. While complaining about sunshine understandably irks many people (especially where it’s scarce), it turns out that Angelenos do have a valid gripe. Now, they’re taking steps to combat it.

What Happened

Like most major cities in the US, Los Angeles is largely made up of asphalt, from its many freeways to its most remote residential streets. Asphalt is strong, durable, relatively cheap, a dark color that complements most surroundings, and easy to apply. Sounds just about perfect for street paving, except for one major drawback: it absorbs between 80 and 95 percent of all the sun’s rays. When LA temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite common, the temperature of the asphalt can rise to a whopping 150. That scenario gets worse when the “urban heat island effect” kicks in, which the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) reports can raise the surrounding air temperature by another 22 degrees.

Beating The Heat

Los Angeles officials quickly endeavored to alleviate the problem. Known for pioneering innovative solutions to widespread problems in the past, it was among the first major cities to replace conventional sanitation trucks with ones that ran on compressed natural gas. Later, in May 2017, the city unveiled a comprehensive street painting project.

Working closely with GuardTop, the city used a reflective coating called CoolSeal to cover select streets in the Canoga Park neighborhood. The temperature of the asphalt on these test streets was 93 degrees on the morning the job started. A single coat of CoolSeal lowered that temperature to a comfortable 70 degrees. 15 streets were ultimately coated in 2017 — something that everyone agreed was very “cool.” Continuing the project into 2018 was a no-brainer.

The Price of Relief

A reprieve from sweltering heat does not come cheaply. CoolSeal is unquestionably quite expensive, costing the city of Los Angeles around $40,000 for every mile coated. But before you start calculating how many box fans and A/C units that money could buy, let’s take a closer look at the whole picture.

Fringe Benefits

In the past 100 years, typical year-round temperatures in Los Angeles have risen five degrees. During the summers, mean temperatures have climbed a whopping 10 degrees. This alarming change is generally attributed to the effects of the high temperatures in the city’s asphalt maze of streets, freeways, roofs, and parking lots. The increased reflectivity of the new coated streets not only cools things down, but it also saves on energy needed to illuminate the lights on those streets. By cooling the surrounding air, light-colored asphalt may also help avert heat-related illnesses and deaths. Greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and water quality reduction incurred by urban “heat islands” can also be alleviated by cooler pavement surfaces. All in all, it’s estimated that the project’s annual energy savings would equal approximately $100 million.

Only time will tell if the coated streets concept will indeed keep Los Angeles cooler in coming years. In the meantime, you can expect more hotspots around the world to start putting reflective paint on their own streets and highways.

The post LA Streets Painted White to Beat the Heat first appeared on Dornob.

How Custom Lighting Structures Enhance City Streets

Phil Roberts — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 15:00:16 +0000

There are some urban spaces and streets where typical streetlights are simply unsuitable. These places require special lighting treatments that emphasize grandeur, mood, or importance. To create those spaces, cities are starting to turn to professional lighting designers for custom streetlamps and lighting structures.
In Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles (French for “entertainment district”), seven white steel custom lighting structures tower over the streets like elegant landmarks. Created by Valmont Structures Canada, these poles provide illumination for both events and everyday urban activities. They also serve as a gantry for large speakers and art installations. The structures’ highest points create an invisible ceiling for the spectacle of creativity and urban vitality below. Because they fit the context so nicely, the poles’ frequency and positioning counterbalance their lack of human scale. Sometimes, urban spaces with custom lighting treatments have either too much lighting or not enough, both of which result in areas that never capture the designer’s intended ambiance. At the Quartier des Spectacles, not only is the quantity suitable to the area, but so is the scale.

When the Irish city of Cork redeveloped its main street in 2004, they wanted it to be more of a walkable plaza than a road. To achieve this effect, the city used streetlamps designed by Barcelona’s Santa & Cole, all of which consist of two painted, galvanized steel limbs (one measuring 32 feet in length and the other measuring 20) braced by a stainless steel support. Their configuration was derived from that of the junction between Saint Patrick’s Street and Grande Parade. At just under 33 feet in height, the streetlamps emit direct light from its longest member and ambient light from its shorter one. Santa & Cole designed a similar lighting scheme for Avenida de Barcelona in Terrassa, Spain. In both instances, the structures give the thoroughfare a sophistication that regular-sized lighting just couldn’t achieve.

Santa & Cole’s streetlamps were so popular that their design was eventually copied by a Qatari company. In 2012, the lighting designers sued Ashghal for stealing their intellectual property when creating the structures for Al Waab Street in Doha. Though the designs are similar, that of the Al Waab Street lighting scheme fails to achieve the grandeur of the ones on St. Patrick’s Street and Avenida de Barcelona. There are too many lights, the spacing is too small, and the structures do nothing to highlight the street. The only things that the lights do seem to enhance are the vacant land and underwhelming buildings around them.

The key to creating the right appearance is in the frequency of the lights. At LAX, for instance, 41-foot-tall light poles exist in harmony with the airport’s façade. These fixtures, designed by Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design, have a checkmark-like form and connote an aviatic context, as they illuminate the departure and arrival roadways beneath them.

With more options for urban lighting treatments than ever before, a designer must be judicious in selecting the right structures. Context, scale, and frequency are just as important as the type of illumination selected.

The post How Custom Lighting Structures Enhance City Streets first appeared on Dornob.

World’s First Smart Street Harvests Energy from Footsteps

Stephanie Rogers — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 21:00:45 +0000

Take a stroll down this lovely walkway in London, and you’ll be doing much more than just window shopping and getting a little exercise in. The small road, which stretches 107 feet through a patch of lush green grass, has officially been named the world’s first “smart street” for its ability to turn people’s footsteps into energy. Unveiled earlier this summer by tech company Pavegen, the smart street generates enough power to play the sounds of chirping birds through nearby speakers, light itself up at night, and transmit information to mobile apps.

The low-energy Bluetooth transmitters embedded in the pathway provide walkers with data about how many steps they’ve taken and how much electricity they’ve produced. On average, an adult walking down the street will generate about five watts per footstep. With just 24 steps, a pedestrian can create 72 joules of energy — enough to power a standard lighting fixture for 14 seconds or a phone call for two whole minutes!

The more you walk along the pathway, the more discounts and vouchers you earn for the pop-up shops on the surrounding “Bird Street,” which runs adjacent to Oxford Street in London’s West End neighborhood. Bird Street also features a high-tech “clean air bench” that filters pollutants out of the atmosphere.

The transformation of a little-used street

Prior to being given a modern touch-up, Bird Street was a disused and dreary area. Now, it’s been transformed into a bright and cheerful destination where visitors can sit, relax, and shop while exposing themselves to a variety of sustainable technologies. Each pop-up shop is positioned in a row of temporary retail units, and all of them are painted a shade of robin’s egg blue.

“The new Pavegen technology known as V3, is sleeker an far more efficient, generating over 200 times more power than the first model manufactured in 2009,” explain the walkway’s designers. “The new triangular design maximizes both energy output and data capture; whilst its high durability and simple deployability allow Pavegen to seamlessly integrate into any location, as an effective decentralized power solution.”

A smart test run in DC

Pavegen’s first large-scale outdoor path was installed in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle last November. Just a stone’s throw away from the White House, this 240-square-foot walkway is in the perfect place to show people exactly how much renewable energy is capable of. Each day, approximately 10,000 people pass over it, illuminating nearby benches and providing LED spotlighting for pedestrians.

Looking to the future of smart tech

Other installations have helped the company gather valuable data about commuters’ walking patterns while raising awareness of alternative energy solutions in cities all around the world. Of course, Pavegen’s goal isn’t to replace other clean technologies like solar and wind, but to provide a supplemental source of off-grid energy that gets people excited about the prospect of a greener future. They also hope to encourage more physical interaction with our urban environments.

“Being able to demonstrate how our technology can bring to life the retail shopping experience is a vital step for us. As retailers compete with online, technologies like ours make being in the busy high street more exciting and rewarding for people and brands alike.”

The post World’s First Smart Street Harvests Energy from Footsteps first appeared on Dornob.

Google Map Pins in Real Life are Actually Bird Houses

dornob — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:00:22 +0000

It is always eye-catching when we find something from our digital experience rendered around us in ‘real life’ – like these application-inspired bird homes made to give our flying friends their own marked destinations in the city. Shuchun Hsiao proposes these refuges as a means of navigation – a set of familiar points, much like Google Map pins are for us, to allow birds to make their way to and around appropriate landmarks.

The designer notes that birds have, in many regards, the most map-like experience of species already, as the expression ‘birds eye view’ suggests. And of course, humans can use them as wayfinding devices as well.

More from Gessato

“At the mention of macroscopic and microscope scales, I never fail to recall Charles and Ray Eames’s famous 1977 ‘Powers of Ten’ documentary, which cinematically zooms in and out on a picnicking couple. We now have a digital convenience of experiencing scale through Google Maps with a simple dash of the scroll wheel. Artist Shuchun Hsiao recognizes this 21^st-century luxury, and the modern symbol that the red bubble marker has become, and shrinks this idea to a smaller scale for our aviary counterparts on Earth.”

“In Project Google Birdhouse, Hsiao constructs a series of birdhouses all formed and painted like Google’s landmark icon, and peppers them around for our feathered friends’ accommodations with the hope that they will become navigation aids. Now, if the birds would start their own Google reviews of Hsiao’s work…”

About Shuchun Hsiao

“Shuchun Hsiao is a product designer specialized in consumer electronics for 9 years. He believes the creative idea comes from physically interact with objects, people and environment. Hsiao’s also skilled in hand making, exploring the possibilities of materials and shapes. This helps to generate more ideas, communicate better across team internally and externally.”

The post Google Map Pins in Real Life are Actually Bird Houses first appeared on Dornob.

Street Furniture: 10 Stolen Signs Turned into New Designs

dornob dornob — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:17:53 +0000

One would be hard-pressed to call a stop sign refined, or consider kitsch clutches anything beyond modestly clever … but these pieces walk that strange narrow (dotted white or double-yellow?) line between junk object reuse and fine furniture design.

Designer Tim Delner labels his work as “stolen government property built by Tim” and, sure enough, the wear and tear on each of these signs suggests it saw some real-life use before being co-opted as part of a new art/furniture object.

But now down to the nuts and bolts: public signage, license plates, plumbing pipes … all of these have been utilized as craft project materials before. So what makes these different? From coffee tables and miniature cabinets to stools and chairs, the answer is in the details.

Each curve, joint and intersection is carefully arranged in response to various elements, from the existing designs on the signs themselves to the overall layout of the pieces.

Great care was taken to make these look less like cobbled-together, yard-sale scrap and to start seeming more like precious pieces of hand-crafted artistry. Still, no matter how hard you try, it is a little hard to take the ‘No Dumping’ sign chair too seriously. Clearly, some fun was had here as well.

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Sneak Peak: Urban Street Artist Paints Full-Scale Home Plans

dornob — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 16:00:36 +0000

Ever walk by and wonder what it would (or will) it be like to occupy a structure slated for construction on an empty lot, before it is built? Sure, architects and developers often post pretty pictures, but those are more art than reality.

Maider Lopez takes straight to the streets to show you a glimpse of the future, hi house previews painted on parking lots and urban plots in the form of architectural plans.

Suddenly, the whole dynamic changes between built and unbuilt housing, passerby and participant, as people are able to walk through yet-un-constructed buildings and imagine them at actual size down to details like doors, windows, sinks and toilets.

White lines highlight walls and other physical objects or barriers, while black represents private (mainly indoor) spaces and gray is used to depict outdoor areas – from close up or distance, this strategy definitely sparks the imagination, fosters interaction and invites collaborative critiques.

The post Sneak Peak: Urban Street Artist Paints Full-Scale Home Plans first appeared on Dornob.

Sou Fujimoto’s 3-Layered House N

dornob — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:00:57 +0000

After covering his puzzle-piece cliff-side retreat and writing about his absurdest house stacked from homes it would be unfair not to step back and see a classic by Sou Fujimoto: House N, the see-through home.

Difficult to describe but beautiful to behold, this bright white wonder consists of a series of three perforated shells, one within the next, that grant privacy when contiguous or properly overlapped, while allowing light, air and views through in calculated ways. The architect calls it a “gradation of domain,” which makes sense when you see how you move through the house to varying levels of privacy.

Layers of light and square shadows dance across the walls and jump from one opening to the next, creating an ever-shifting composition of illumination against the ever-bare walls both inside and out (if the distinction is even relevant in this case).

From the architect: “I have always had doubts about streets and houses being separated by a single wall, and wondered that a gradation of rich domain accompanied by various senses of distance between streets and houses might be a possibility, such as: a place inside the house that is fairly near the street; a place that is a bit far from the street, and a place far off the street, in secure privacy.”

“That is why life in this house resembles to living among the clouds. A distinct boundary is nowhere to be found, except for a gradual change in the domain. One might say that an ideal architecture is an outdoor space that feels like the indoors and an indoor space that feels like the outdoors.”

“In a nested structure, the inside is invariably the outside, and vice versa. My intention was to make an architecture that is not about space nor about form, but simply about expressing the riches of what are `between` houses and streets.”

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Tiny House Made from a Dumpster

dornob — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:00:25 +0000

Is there a worse place you can imagine living? One artist (or perhaps aspiring architect) has taken the dirtiest, most generic and cramped container you can think of and turned it into a multifaceted, fully-functional home.

Inside: a working kitchen and toilet, storage and sleeping areas. Outside: modular components can be added to create a shaded rooftop deck (complete with dancing pole), somewhat breezy outdoor shower, an impromptu flower bed, grill, bar and more.

Onsite gas and water storage makes it work all-but-off-the-grid (with the notable exception of electricity – for now). Gregory Kloehn has kept decor to a minimum, but added plywood and carpet to surfaces as needed.

Best of all: you can hide this sucker in plain sight and no one would be the wiser – what’s one more rusted green dumpster sitting alongside the street or tucked away in an urban ally, anyway?

While it might not win any architectural beauty pageants, it sure beats living (directly) on the streets. And yes, thanks to positive feedback, Kloehn will also build you your very own for under $5,000.

From The Daily Mail:

“An eccentric designer has created a home out of a dumpster, complete with working kitchen, toilet and shower. Gregory Kloehn spent seven months converting a street skip into a permanent residence. He fitted a kitchen, toilet, shower, living and sleeping areas, all within the tiny confines of the typical dumpster.”

“At night, the home can be transformed to protect it from vandals by lowering the roof and windows to return its look to a giant trashcan. San Francisco-based Gregory, a descendant of Abraham Lincoln, got the inspiration while building a home out of a shipping container. He said: ‘I would look over the fence at a dumpster on the adjacent property.'”

“‘After some time I realized the dumpster, with its pitch roof, looked more like a home then the containers – it was just like a little metal tent. ‘I knew from that moment I was going to transform a dumpster into a home.’ The interior boasts granite work surfaces, a stainless steel sink and back splash, commercial stove and toaster oven, finished off with a hardwood floor.”

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Who Needs Furniture When You Have a Concrete Dome?

dornob — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:00:23 +0000

The rest of this home in Osaka, Japan, is creative, contemporary and contextual … making a curious hill-like concrete dome within the domicile stand out all the more.

Inside, there is a small living room space with a curved ceiling and adjacent bathroom, all made cozy as a retreat from summer heat or insulated relaxation area for winter mornings when the in-flooring heating slowly comes to life.

An aperture lets out selective views and admits direct sunlight during part of the year and indirect day lighting during the rest, based upon desired solar heat gain and other sustainability factors.

This unusual domestic intervention is bold not just because it is draped with insulating cloth, making it almost tent-or-yurt-like in appearance, but due to the contrast between its and thee house’s primary colors (green versus white), materials (concrete versus wood) and shapes (domed versus rectilinear).

Designed by SpaceSpace architects, this truly is a space within a space. As for the rest of the home: second-story bedrooms provide privacy, while the main floor feels almost like a storefront, engaging the busy urban adjacencies per the programmatic desires of the clients.

More from the architects

“This area has a peculiar atmosphere of openness. Signboards and plant pots are put on the street and there are many long-term residents, who are often seen chatting around the street.This site is like a ‘special valley spot of the zoning regulation.’ A zoning change line (Commercial district to Housing district) is designated near the southern border line of the lot.”

“So, the house can be built slightly higher than the neighboring one in this site. Under such surroundings, a two-story wooden house is built. The 1st floor which connects to the street for creating living space linked with lively outside, and the 2nd floor is taken a physical distance from the busy street and its floor slab is lifted higher than the neighboring eaves for taking enough sunlight into the 1st floor.”

“In winter, the kamakura-shaped hill with a bathroom inside can store solar heat collected through a large window allocated upper south part on the 1st floor. It can also be functioned as various living goods such as a sofa when watching TV, a verandah when sitting from outside with a window open, a screen from the entrance, a storehouse and a play place for children.Bedrooms of the 2nd floor are minimum size so the 2nd floor hall is used for all activities such as study or reading other than sleeping.”

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Alleyway Abode: 4-Foot-Narrow Live/Work Writer’s Studio

dornob — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:00:54 +0000

It looks somewhat like a squished spaceship, squeezed into a space that (at its skinniest) is a mere 2 feet and 4 inches wide. And yes, it’s real, and designed to be a full-time residence.

Stuffed inside a side street once packed with trash and graffiti, this Warsaw dwelling by Centrala is composed of plywood panels on a steel frame with foam insulation along the front, top and back of the building.

Neither side needs (nor can afford the space for) much insulating, given that both sides touch existing adjacent buildings. The exterior will be draped in white-painted concrete cloth, both blending into the surroundings (in terms of color) while standing out from them (in terms of material, texture, scale and smoothness).

Water and sewage systems are semi-off-the-grid, operating more like a boat or mobile home than a normal full-time residence. A remote-control stairway extends downward to accommodate entries and exists without displacing interior or outdoor space otherwise.

As for building code compliance: this ultra-narrow alleyway residence bucks (or circumvents) the system, designated an art installation rather than a residence. It is, after all, being designed to be used as semi-permanent guest accommodations for visiting writers – a live-work studio that may be cramped, but is also quite inspiring.

It may look too narrow to be real, but it has, in fact, been built. Here’s a description from the architects, via ArchDaily:

“Keret House is fully functional space in which one can live as well as create. It is located between buildings at Chlodna 22 Street and Zelazna 74 Street. ‘We deeply believe it will become a symbol of modern Warsaw ingrained in its complicated history. The House attracts attention of media from entire world. He hopes it will show the most fascinating side of Warsaw’, said project curators Sarmen Beglarian and Sylwia Szymaniak form Polish Modern Art Foundation.”

“CENTRALA (Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis) is a Warsaw-based architecture and research studio that works with reinterpretations and spatial interventions aimed at renewing the language of architecture. In their architecture research practice, they observe the relations between architecture and natural phenomena. They conceive architecture as a process rather than a static form, and consider gravity, water circulation, and atmospheric and astronomical events as its building materials. In architecture that combines an intimate, human scale with the scale of the planet, they see a tool that can help us tune in to the rhythm of the surrounding world.”

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Innovative Concrete Shows Secret Patterns When Wet, Hot

dornob — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:00:13 +0000

Just like ordinary concrete surfaces, it looks a tad dull and drag when dry … but put it in a place with condensation-producing heat, running water or natural rain and it reveals hidden decorative designs (that disappear again as it dries).

Conceived by Frederik Molenschot and Susanne Happle, it is a bit like the old bathroom mirror trick – the writing, picture or pattern appears and disappears with moisture content. On a humid day you might get partial glimpses of what would be fully visible during a torrential downpour.

Floral patterns and falling leaves conjure images of sidewalks and steps where organic matter fell before the poured concrete fully dried, but the possibilities beyond that are endless as well – spirals of words in your bathroom sink, interactive decor in public places, steamy subliminal messages in urban night clubs or remote saunas.

While custom and cast-in-place patterns are possible, prefab repeating modules make this a store-shelf-ready concept just waiting to enjoy mass production and commercial distribution.

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Boeing’s Fake World War II Town

dornob dornob — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:00:00 +0000

The destruction of a lesser-known Seattle pseudo-suburb is underway. This series of a dozen square blocks was lofted forty feet in the air but, despite looking picture-perfect from above with its series of pristine streets, homes, yards and trees, it was never actually intended for human habitation. Take a closer look to see why.

Yes, those trees and shrubs are all fake, made of camouflage netting and astroturf. The houses are much too small to occupy. If it all seems a little eerie and quiet, that’s because it’s not a real town at all, but rather a decoy built on the roof of a Boeing factory south of downtown Seattle. Built during World War II, Boeing’s fake town hides the aircraft manufacturer’s production facility below, which is the cumulative size of eight football fields.

“Houses, streets and plants were assembled like stage props out of plywood, clapboard, chicken wire and burlap, covering the plant’s roof during World War II. If any Japanese bombers made it this far east, the hope was that their pilots would mistake this for a quiet residential neighborhood.”

Despite the proximity of faux overhead homes, workers from the plane plant took an entirely opposite route to get out, heading down instead of up. Secret underground tunnels to reach nearby and likewise-camouflaged cafeterias, classrooms and restrooms — images of people on top were merely staged for a post-construction photo and film shoot.

But these would-have-been houses will not go to waste — the reclamation of remaining materials is in progress. The Duluth Timber Company is salvaging scraps as well as heavy timber beams from the site before it is leveled.

As for the plant itself: it became increasingly outdated (and structurally dangerous) as decades passed despite being the original home of many famous Boeing aircraft including the original B-52 bomber and 737 jetliner. (Via Inhabitat, Wavy & more at Wikipedia)

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Full Stop, New Direction: Shape-Based Traffic Signal Design

Dornob Staff — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:17:18 +0000

In some cases, a stop light is obvious – it sits above ‘caution’ and ‘go’ in a normal street signal … or we simply select the right color regardless of other atypical factors. However, the exceptions to this design standard norm can be perilous in the case of colorblind people who cannot see the red, orange and/or green differentiations. This is one of those urban planning elements we all take for granted, but at a potentially costly loss of personal security.

The solution is as simple as elementary geometric shapes: triangle for stop, circle for caution and square for go perhaps? It is not the specifics that matter, but standardization: just like countries shifting (though the USA continues to lag) to the metric system – painful perhaps in the short term, and certainly not cheap, but with long-term safety benefits to society as a whole.

The Uni-Signal is a proposed redesign by Ji-youn Kim, Soon-young Yang & Hwan-ju Jeon (via YankoDesign) for one of the most universal elements in the world, yet one which was never designed with color vision issues in mind. Who knows how many crashes per year this could help prevent if it were present at intersections the world over.

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