Cyclemon is a series of very successful visual imagining types of bike users. From the gangster hipster to the runner, fantastic creations Thomas Romain and Bourdieux Pomarelle.
i get the motorcycle silhouette, but where's the diamond shape? where the down tube?
Viks is a Urban steel commuter, it features a stainles steel unique frame without seat tube. 100% handmade in Estonia. Two identical tube frames rune alongside the entire frame. Joined at the head tube, seat tube and bottom bracket.
Hip-Hop superstar Jay-Z took to Twitter last night for a rare Twitter session for a #factsonly chat with fans online.
Jay-Z, who follows no-one on Twitter yet has 2.7million followers, revealed crucial facts during his session, including his favourite cereal growing up ('Cap'n Crunch - FYI) and responded to questions about himself, Kanye West - and of course, those Miley Cyrus lyrics on his new album, Magna Carter Holy Grail.
Jay-Z responded to fans' tweets, with bracketed answers. Highlights of which included him revealing his favourite Britney Spears single, his admiration for UK James Blake and that his Frank Ocean collaboration 'Oceans' was recorded two years ago.
Britney Spears later responded to the name-check, writing on her own Twitter account: "You learn something every day! Never knew @S_C_ was a fan of Toxic! That's Big Pimpin ;)"
Check out some of Jay-Z's Twitter highlights below
RT @TylerBritter Do you still have 99 problems or have they all been sorted? [#newrules new problems]
Grégoire De Lafforest designed the reinvention of Rue Voltaire residence located in Paris, France.
This 2-bedroom apartment features a modular greenhouse kitchen beside the combined living and dining area, all under a skylight. This 103 square meter apartment was completed in 2012.
This is Bazz. He's a black Lab who lives in southern Australia with his owner, Josh Kennett. Other than that, he's a perfectly normal pup. Except, you know, that he's a dog beekeeper, with an incredible dog beekeeper suit to match.
the name given to this sumptuous chair is originated from its thin dark legs and sleek corpulent body reminiscent of a spider.
the contrast between the materials that compose arachnide inspired the swiss architecture firm to design it: the luminosity and the modern attributes exalted by the use of aluminium were combined with the darkness and the nobility expressed by the smoked oak. as a result of a heterogeneous combination, depending on the view point this oblique-angled sculpture, can turn into an inviting and bright seating with an exciting glow.
the metal, applied to compose the seating part and to draw a slightly shimmer line on the brown legs, was shaped in a high polished finish that allows the reflection of the surrounding environment, creating a mirror effect. it plays an illusion sensation to the eyes while the matte wood, gives the effect of stability and strength, providing the perfect balance for those who are searching comfort and high quality in one contemporary unit.
this revolutionary design raised from the challenge of playing with two distinct elements and was transformed from sketch to reality, by the swiss precision. in a response for this fact, even though arachnide was created to be a minimalistic piece, it has an outstanding exposure independent wherever it is inserted.
despite of the possibility to be allocated to any ambience this elegant and timeless piece of furniture, originally handcrafted and produced in 1100 mm x 540 mm with a height of 720 mm, is also available in different dimensions and materials, that can be shaped by request. the combination of other elements does not influence the authentic idea of arachnide and compositions such as leather/wood and fabric/metal also present a contrast.
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the 50th International Making Cities Livable Conference here in Portland, Oregon. This year’s theme was, “reshaping suburbia into healthy communities”, a rather hot topic these days.
Kogeto Dot is more than a iPhone lens. It’s a fast and fun way to shoot fully-interactive 360 degree video which you can then share instantly with your friends online. Just snap it on your phone, shoot a panoramic video, then post to facebook, twitter, or kogeto.com.
imagine biking in places like birmingham, atlanta, wv, hils, HILLS, HIIIIILLS
DUMBO's main drag is located at the bottom of a large, steep hill, and this distinctive geographical layout appears to be heavily influencing the choices made by local Citi Bike users: you can grab a bike on the way to work and coast almost all the way to your office, shaving time off your commute and enjoying a little exercise. But this flow of riders coming down the hill each morning is not balanced by traffic going back up the hill, because that's a hard ride and most hipsters are lazy. Also, the tourists who might enjoy taking the bikes out to see Brooklyn Bridge Park don't arrive until later in the day. [ more › ]
Charles & Ray Eames are amongst the most important designers in the 20th century. This couple is well known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and photography. They also worked in the fields of graphic design, fine art and film.
They were the perfect match. He was an architect and she was a painter. They specialized in furniture design with molding plywood and in organic design. They were an original and creative duo and the design process they used was really amazing. They designed their own house in 1949. Their most famous products are “la chaise” and the “plastic chair”.
The La Chaise is a sculptural Chaise Lounge designed in 1948 and made by two bonded fiberglass shells, chromed rod base with natural oak cruciform foot. Produced by Vitra, this chair was originally designed in 1948 for a competition at the MOMA… Read more.
Sideboards are a desirable and fashionable accessory that can offer great storage to a dining room, and can also be great center pieces, especially if it’s one of these…
The Heritage Boy Carpetry collection draws inspiration from Persian Nain Rugs, but uses a modern colour palette to introduce a contemporary feel to the design.
The exterior of this fanciful piece is covered in silver leaf finished with a luxurious shade of translucent amethyst high gloss varnish. The whimsical lion’s head feet are intricately hand carved from mahogany and completed with a gold leaf.
Turn the lights down low, and the photo-realistic image of the moon’s surface lavishly printed on one of its sides produces a soft, pleasant glow that adds a celestial touch to any decor. Using special luminous and ecological paint called ELI.
A simple shape and a pure volume where the absence of pointless details highlights the value of the materials and the excellence of the finish. An item where the use of different materials, emphasized by the light and cleverly coordinated with the shiny steel of the sides and the base.
The cabinet Antoine Audiau and Manuel Warosz have designed for this new collection brought out by BD Barcelona Design is a surprising mixture of applied arts, hieroglyphic language, contemporary graphics, fantasy and optimism. It is produced with the quality of yesterday but using today’s technologies.
In Urban Velo #37 we covered the Penrose Park Velodrome, and how through grassroots efforts the track is seeing renewed interest with local groups fundraising towards a complete rehabilitation of the 60 year old structure. SpokedSTL is behind the clinics that have been bringing in new riders, and have grown their own ranks in the process. Ernesto Pacheco shot the feature in issue #37, and recently put up a few pictures from the team shoot in downtown St Louis. This is one look at the future of bicycle racing in America.
NeverWet is a revolutionary super hydrophobic system. This product creates a barrier that dramatically repels water, mud, ice and more. Can be used on virtually any surface…
Jen Lu is an advertising creative. When she’s not advertising, she’s doing hood rat stuff under the name Jen.Lu. She enjoys the Internet, good design, and really fun side projects.
Scheduled for completion later this year, Bosco Verticale, by Boeri Studio, will be the world’s first vertical forest. The project’s inspired many supporters, but also many detractors. Speaking to its controversiality, Lloyd Alter, the architect, sustainable design enthusiast, and managing editor of Treehugger, called it “the rendering that launched a thousand blog posts.”
And perhaps no blogger caused more stir in the architecture community than Tim De Chant, who implored “can we please stop putting trees on skyscrapers”? De Chant’s article set off a maelstrom of comments from ArchDaily users, who vigorously debated both for and against the idea of putting trees on buildings.
To get to the bottom of this, we talked with Lloyd Alter himself about vertical forests and the real challenges and benefits they present. Lloyd is a regular contributor to Inhabitat, The Huffington Post and numerous other publications; he also teaches at Ryerson University School of Interior Design. Read on for Lloyd’s take on this controversial trend, after the break.
What are the biggest challenges in construction of vertical forests, and how, if at all, can these obstacles be overcome?
Trees and the soil that support them are heavy. The concrete planters that support them are heavy. I wonder how long it will take for the CO2 released in making the concrete that holds up the trees to have the equivalent amount of CO2 absorbed by the trees. I suspect never.
What are the pros and cons?
The biggest benefit is the shading. Vines and trees are the perfect device for this function because the leaves fall off, shading in summer and letting the sun through in winter. They obviously absorb CO2 and clean the air. There are few downsides.
But the one downside I can think of is the appropriateness of trees versus vines or other plants. If I was convinced that it would ever look like the rendering I would have no qualms at all.
Why do you think Bosco Verticale, a vertical forest design in Milan, is on the track to succeeding where so many others have failed?
I am not certain that it is on track to succeeding. Give it ten years. Personally, I love the idea. I just hope it works.
What do you think Bosco Verticale will look like ten years down the road?
I suspect not much different than it does one year down the road after all the trees are installed. They may not die, but they are not going to grow into the forest that is shown on the rendering. There just isn’t enough room for the roots. You see this in city trees all the time; they survive but they don’t seriously thrive and grow big, they don’t have the room.
Milan is one of the most polluted cities in the world, and part of the objective of Bosco Verticale is to use its trees to clean the air. Will this have a perceptible effect on air quality, and how will this affect the health of the trees?
I am certain that this will have a perceptible effect on the air quality of the people who live in the building; just sitting under a tree anywhere is lovely and cool because of the shade and transpiration of moisture. Trees are the perfect sunshades for a building; the leaves fall off and the sun shines through. In a lot of ways it is absolutely the most logical thing to do in a building, they are the perfect seasonal shading device. My biggest concern here is that the reality will never match the rendering, because, again, they are not in the ground but in a limited size planter.
Are there additional safety concerns that need to be taken into consideration when building vertical forests?
Weight, and breaking limbs in big storms. This happens on the ground and the limbs kill people. what happens when it falls off the building?
You wrote that putting trees on skyscrapers is greenwrapping – can you elaborate on this?
By greenwrapping I mean using something green, like a roof or solar panels, to disguise or attempt to minimize the impact of a noxious use or something that just doesn’t fit. This is not greenwrapping; the trees are a big part of the building, its most important distinguishing feature.
Do you have any favorite vertical forest designs?
Look at the work of Eduoard Francois, who started with the Flower Tower and has moved on to bigger projects. He doesn’t do green walls, but he does living facades, planted in the ground and growing to cover the buildings. The Building that Grows is my favorite, where the wall is designed like a natural cliff, a gabion of rocks that promote natural growth.
From Eduoard Francois’ website:
“One morning, when handling rocks, chicken wire, and concrete, we invented a living skin. It had to grow; to sprout. We put bags of potting soil and plants behind the stones. We watered it with organic fertilizer. It was seeded by mountain climbers. Then we installed an automatic irrigation system on the façade.
The building grows. Slowly. Its skin has become a kind of mini-ecosystem. The water collects in the interstices, algae forms and then dies, mosses grow and herbs colonize the resulting compost. Scattered, physical traces reflect these transformations.”
Are there any promising designs for vertical forests in the works?
I have seen a lot of them, but I cannot remember if they are Evolo wet dreams or reality.
Do you think vertical forests will ever be practical?
I have serious doubts.
How much of the problem is the trees? Would buildings covered in other forms of vegetation be more sensible? If so, what kind of vegetation?
That is part of the problem; trees evolved to go into the ground. There are all kinds of plants that evolved to climb and creep. Some of them grow out of the tiniest of crevices and cling to little bits of rock. I would think that there are many kinds of plant that one could design a building to promote and support.
What advice would you give to upcoming architects who are interested in working in this area?
I had lunch today with a lawyer who had a problem: his clients wanted to build houses on back lanes where there were no sewer and water services, and he wondered, were there alternatives? In fact there are many, from rainwater collection to composting toilets, you can go off pipe as well as off grid. Green roofs and vertical forests provide the option of increasing our independence and resilience; I would kill for an orange tree on my balcony that could make my breakfasts sweet. We also have to look at every way we can to make high-rise living as pleasant as living at grade, and that means green.
What advice would you give to people who live in cities and want to bring more greenery into their lives?
First of all, invest in your rooftop. It should be in the zoning bylaws that every roof should be built to be green, and I don’t just mean the thin green roof, but a real, habitable plantable roof that can support real trees or real agriculture.
Then we have to take back the streets. It is criminal that a person gets to occupy 200 square feet of space to park a car, when you can grow $1400 worth of food in that much space. Who gave it all to the cars? Perhaps we wouldn’t need to think about vertical forests and farms if we properly used the horizontal space on the roofs and in the street.
Living in Brooklyn, New York, Alex Levin is a writer specializing in sustainable design. For information on responsible tree care, check out the Sherrill Tree Learning Center.
They may be riddled with clunky panels and weirdly aggressive shoulder guards, but these high-tech togs will keep a phone juiced up way past the time it normally loses a charge. That is assuming it's sunny outside – if the cloud cover is thick, then you're just looking like Batman for no good reason.
The "Wearable Solar" coat shown below is one of two photovoltaic-loaded civvies (the other's a sleeveless dress) developed by Dutch innovation-funding firm Gelderland Valoriseert and Pauline van Dongen, whose neo-clothing line also includes 3-D printed shoes and vestments that look like erosion. The jet-black accoutrements are equipped with panels and sleeves sheltering up to 48 removable solar cells; when worn out in bright daylight, the makers of "Wearable Solar" claim, the items can restore up to half of a phone's battery life in one hour.
Turning humans into their snazzy, walking energy generators was initially an idea aimed at attendees of large music festivals, who rely on phones to locate roaming friends and tucked-away stages. But van Dongen thinks that solar-powered raiments could find a wider audience in the future, telling the Dutch site Design.nl (head there for good photos of the clothes):
I am convinced that this could lead to a product that can be marketed on a big scale, largely because of the growing role played by connectivity in our current society and because of the enormous potential that solar energy has to offer. It is the biggest source of energy on earth and it’s important that people realize its value....
I think that science, biology and for instance nano technology will have a huge impact on future developments within fashion.
Aside from power cells, these renewable-energy body shells are fabricated from a pleasing and hard-to-rip mixture of wool and leather. There's no word on how hot it might get inside them, but if it's too sweaty the solution shouldn't be hard to find – just stick in some ventilation fans that run off the solar panels.
Here's the designer and associates explaining a bit more about how the clothes work. They're now working on pushing out versions for the commercial market:
some of the ugliest bike helmets are bmx, skateboard, motorcycle inspired...WHY?
We recently posted about the Nutcase Helmets display outside the newly opened Cyclepedia: Iconic Bicycle Design exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. From Oregon Public Broadcasting comes this short film with collector Michael Embacher, and a look at some of the bikes from his collection now on public display.
From economics to urbanism, I believe every contemporary topic can be looked at through the lens of human history, which is why I prefer to retain the “Anthropologist” part of my urban title.
A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery. But don’t try it at home yet– the components in the battery tested by scientists are a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper.
catch-22. concentrate low-income or disperse and exacerbate gang issues
The city has torn down all of its high rises and says it's close to completing its plans to transform public housing. Chicago leaders want to use public housing funds to build not just homes for poor families but stores as well. However, some say that breaks a promise to provide affordable housing.
If local's so great, why is the HOA, the country's most popular form of micro-governance, such an impediment to complete, complex and convivial communities? Scott Doyon has some ideas.
Alexander patiently creates these amazing book-objects by taking old books, cutting out pages one after another, leaving only the illustrations that are important to the narration. This way he creates three dimensional artworks that tell a story.
DUMBO's main drag is located at the bottom of a large, steep hill, and this distinctive geographical layout appears to be heavily influencing the choices made by local Citi Bike users: you can grab a bike on the way to work and coast almost all the way to your office, shaving time off your commute and enjoying a little exercise. But this flow of riders coming down the hill each morning is not balanced by traffic going back up the hill, because that's a hard ride and most hipsters are lazy. Also, the tourists who might enjoy taking the bikes out to see Brooklyn Bridge Park don't arrive until later in the day. [ more › ]
