In Boston, playgrounds are no longer just for kids. Twenty LED-lit circular swings have been installed outdoors as a part of “Swing Time,” Boston’s first interactive sculpture installation. The hanging, glowing orbs are a twist on traditional rubber-and-rope swings, dangling from a minimal steel structure similar to those used in conventional playgrounds. LED lights embedded in the swings activate and change color as each swing moves, returning to a dim white light when static. The piece is designed to blend Boston’s design community with its expanding technology sector while playfully engaging residents.
Take a seat in “Swing Time” with more photos and info after the break.
Inspired by traditional playgrounds, Swing Time aims to activate outdoor spaces in Boston using technology and creativity, and was designed by Boston-based Howeler and Yoon Architecture in response to a lack of opportunity for urban play in the city. Swing Time is located at the Lawn on D, a contemporary sculpture park that borders on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on D Street on the city’s southern waterfront. The Lawn on D belongs to Boston’s newly minted Innovation District, an experimental area designed to foster the city’s burgeoning technology sector. Mayor Thomas M. Menino has defined the Innovation District as an “urban environment that fosters innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship,” creating a unique challenge for the designers of Swing Time.
The project represents a fusion of technology and community engagement while providing a new platform to celebrate local ingenuity. Each swing is formed of custom moulded and welded polypropylene built in three sizes for optimal use by residents of all ages. Movement in each swing is measured by an internal accelerometer that triggers the change of colour in the LED lighting system, ranging from white to blue and purple. The brief from Howeler and Yoon adds: “Swing Time‘s responsive play elements invite users to interact with the swings and with each other, activating the urban park and creating a community laboratory in the Innovation District and South Boston Neighbourhoods.”
Swing Time will play host to a series of social, culinary, and generally playful events, and will remain open to the public on Boston’s Lawn on the D until October 31st.
““I have seen the best of you and the worst of you and I choose both. I want to share every single one of your sunshines and save them for later. I want to tuck them into my pockets and give them back to you when the rains fall hard. I want to be the mirror that reminds you to love yourself. I want to be the air in your lungs to remind you to breathe easy. When the walls come down, when the thunder rumbles, hold my hand, and I promise, I won’t let go.””
- Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye, “An Origin Story” (via avvfvl)
I often think of vertical gardens as the utilitarian cousin of the decorative container garden. You’d love a vegetable garden, but your studio apartment in the city didn’t come with an acre of land. Enter the vertical garden. Focusing only … Read More...
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IKEA sells $28 billion in furniture a year, but it pays only $2 billion in taxes, about 3.5%. Why? Its parent company's parent company is a non-profit. If that sounds a bit dodgy, that's because it is. Minute MBA does a great explainer video about the company's structure for those in headshaking mode.
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Before eating many fruits and some vegetables, some people—bad, or perhaps ignorant people—do something which renders the produce less tasty, less colorful, less texturally interesting, and much less nutritious. The worst of these offenses involves one of my favorite fruits: the kiwi.
California grows the vast majority of domestic kiwi, and California’s kiwi growing season starts in October, which is mere weeks away. This is exciting, because the kiwi is a spectacular fruit: its color is otherworldly; it leans wonderfully to the tart side of the sweet/tart scale; and it has more vitamin C than an orange. But an awful lot of people don’t buy them, because they are seen, incorrectly, as being in the grand tradition of difficult-to-eat tropical fruits.
Just as it takes practice to properly carve a mango (the first method here is the correct one, since you should never peel a mango before cutting it), or to remove the spiky, dangerous skin of a pineapple (like this), the kiwi has the reputation of a fruit that requires…work. Typical ways to eat it include skinning it with a vegetable peeler and slicing into rounds or cutting it in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon. These options require not one but TWO utensils. Jesus Christ.
I am about to blow your minds, friends. (Unless you already know this, in which case, cool, let’s make a salad together sometime.) The proper way to eat a kiwi is exactly the way you would eat a peach.
Which is to say, wash it lightly, and then bite right into it. The kiwi is better with its skin than without it. The skin isn’t just edible, it’s one of my favorite parts of any fruit. It’s similar to a peach skin, in that it is sort of fuzzy and that the flesh directly under the skin is a bit more tart than the deep insides, but the kiwi’s skin is even thicker and thus provides even more delightful textural contrast to the green flesh within.
But what about the fuzz, you ask? Surely it renders the kiwi unpleasant to eat! To that I ask this: how many people reading this post have a beard or enjoy kissing people with beards or both? I WOULD WAGER THERE ARE A LOT OF YOU.
Give the kiwi a rinse under cold water then scratch it lightly with your fingernails, rub it with a dish towel, or scrape it with a spoon to remove the excess fuzz. This takes about five seconds; the fuzz will come shed itself easily. In fact, the only parts of the kiwi that aren’t edible are the ends, where the fruit attaches to the vine (kiwis grow on vines, like grapes).
Kiwis aren’t the only fruits you shouldn’t be peeling; unless the skin is classified as inedible, like mango, passionfruit, pineapple, lychee, avocado, or dragonfruit, you should eat it. The skin is often the healthiest part of the entire fruit, since it’s packed with fiber, vitamins, and minerals, even when the inside of the item has little of nutritional value (cough, potatoes). As a general rule, the darker the item, the better it is for you, which is how you can tell spinach is healthier than iceberg lettuce (which is 96% water but would be better if it was 100% water and just a glass of water because iceberg is seriously the worst edible leaf on the planet). And it even applies to individual items: hence, the rich outside of an apple is healthier than its pale white insides (color is always better than white. That’s a cool edgy racial joke). There are about a billion scientific studies examining the health benefits of peels; here’s a good survey, which focuses on the antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory properties of fruit and vegetable skins. (Spoiler: They have a lot of them.) Also, peels are full of insoluble fiber, which sounds like a bad thing but is not because it helps you have good poops. Who doesn’t want good poop?
So: Never peel potatoes. Never peel sweet potatoes. Never peel eggplants or apples or cucumbers or, shockingly bananas. Mostly you can just leave the peel on and do whatever you planned on doing with the fruit or vegetable; roast, boil, puree, or eat raw. Banana peels are a weird one though, since they’re edible, and very healthy, but have sort of a shitty texture when raw. In India, they are sometimes deep-fried into chips, or turned into a sort of chutney with coconut. Apparently you can also bake them to remove moisture and then make tea; I haven’t tried this, but I will. Or you can be lazy and just toss them into a smoothie with the rest of the banana.
Lots of skins that are normally considered not edible secretly are, in some way. Citrus can be zested with a microplane or some other sharp tool; the outside of the citrus has some of the most oil and thus most flavor of the entire fruit. (It’s the pith, the white part just under the zest, that’s bitter and gross.) Zest is good both to build flavor from the beginning, or as a finisher, like parmesan cheese. If you can scrape the zest off in one piece, you can gnaw on it raw; it has a pretty intense citrus flavor, more intense than the pulp. But my favorite use is in vinaigrettes: Get some neutral oil (grapeseed is my favorite), some rice wine vinegar, honey, and a little chile paste, and then get out your microplane and grate in a shitload of orange zest and ginger, and whisk vigorously. Goes great on a spinach salad, if you must eat leaves. (Also, have you been throwing away the peels from your alliums? DON’T. Onion and garlic skins, the papery stuff, still has flavor in it; save it in a ziploc bag and toss into stocks.)
Watermelon rinds make for great pickles, with a texture not too far removed from cucumber (to which it is related). Remove the green outer layer, dice the white part into cubes, and par-boil for about five minutes, until it’s no longer tough, then strain and put in a glass container. Separately, bring a saucepan of apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, a couple sticks of cinnamon, some allspice berries, and maybe a star anise (what are the units of star anise, one star?) to a boil, then pour over the rinds. Let sit overnight. If you want, you can strain the liquid the next day, bring it back to a boil, and pour it over the rinds again, but I never do. Pickled watermelon rinds go especially well with barbecue or Mexican food.
Every parent that gives in and peels an apple for their child, every fast-food restaurant that removes potato peels before making fries, every fussy “Top Chef” judge who has a vendetta against the peels on peppers should be ashamed. You only have to look to the kiwi to see just how transformational the peel can be. Go ahead, buy a kiwi and just chomp right into it. It’ll totally change the way you see it: suddenly it’s portable, cheap, and delicious walk-around fruit, like an apple, but tropical. Eat kiwi. Eat skin.
Crop Chef is a new column about the correct ways to prepare and consume plant matter, by Dan Nosowitz, a freelance human who enjoys hot salads and lives in Brooklyn, naturally.
Sparksfly Design studio represented by Clive Cooper has a large specialization in various fields of art and design. Watermelon carving is an exclusive part of them.
Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has announced the winning proposal for the Cinematography and Audiovisual Tower that will be built in capital Buenos Aires.
Out of five competing proposals, MRA+A Álvarez| Bernabó | Sabatini’s design was selected. At 335 meters, the skyscraper will become the tallest building in Latin America, surpassing the 300-meter Costanera tower in Santiago, Chile and a 330-meter tower under development in Monterrery, Mexico. To be used mainly for Argentina’s film and television industry, the tower will have 67 floors and 216,000 square meters of space. A hotel will occupy the top 13 floors.
More details after the break…
Conceptually, the building’s design is “a geometric abstraction that represents Argentina,” according to the official announcement. The building itself represents the contiguous Argentina, while Tierra del Fuego will be represented through a future Ferry Terminal, and the Malvinas islands will be represented by a future multipurpose Arena.
The planned 216,000 square meters will be distributed between industry use (television and movie studies, offices, archives and scenery workshops); education (educational institutions and the Museum of the History of Argentine Audiovisual Arts); institutional (National Institute of Cinematography and Visual Arts) and private (production offices, production studios and private station offices).
Located in Buenos Aires’ Puerto Madero neighborhood, the Audiovisual Tower is part of a masterplan to unite the neighborhood’s green areas and create a new green axis by relocating industrial warehouses and unused buildings.
The project is to be carried out in four stages, and total investment is expected to reach close to $300 million. Financing wll come from the Argentine government as well as the company Riva SA, who was awarded the project along with MRA+A. Construction is supposed to begin by the end of 2014 and wrap up by 2018.
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Forget about scanning the pages of your notebook – you can now work in both analog and digital at the same time. Moleskine recently teamed up with Livescribe, a smartpen manufacturer, to create two new notebooks that work exclusively with Livescribe smartpens to instantly transfer ideas from paper to screen. The notebooks feature add-ons that make this possible, but still retain the rounded edges, elastic closures, ribbon bookmarks, and other details Moleskine notebooks are known for. To learn about the notebook add-ons and how they work with the smartpens, keep reading after the break.
The inner pockets of the new notebooks expand to reveal two bookmarks printed with smartpen buttons and controls, as seen in the image below. Users can also tap their Livescribe smartpens on icons at the bottom of the classic ivory pages to tag and flag items as well as record audio that synchronizes with their notes.
Gilles Bouchard, the CEO of Livescribe said of his company’s partnership with Moleskine: “There’s something magical about writing on paper with a pen, it opens up your imagination and allows you to expand your thinking beyond the constraints of a keyboard. With these new Moleskine notebooks and a Livescribe smartpen, you can tap into that inspiration, and store everything on your digital devices too.”
Livescribe currently carries three different types of smartpens. To learn about the differences between them, click here. A limited stock of the Livescribe Notebooks by Moleskine are currently available in Canada and the US on Livescribe’s website and globally on Moleskine’s website for $29.95. Check them out if you’re not ready to let go of paper and pen!
Despite its impressive exterior dimensions, this West Bellevue House in Washington, USA features only two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The owners probably thought too much living space would in time lead to boring maintenance problems, so they decided to center their home around a giant garage. Discovered by Freshome on Redfin, this unconventional residence (priced $4 million !) has enough space to accommodate 16 cars. It also comes with a practical car lift and a fully stocked workshop.
As you can see in the photos below, the garage was turned into a inner gallery, where the cars are creatively on display. An adjoining living room separated from the garage with the help of glass windows is the perfect place for the inhabitants to enjoy their car collection all day long. A mix of traditional and modern can be observed throughout the residence- just notice the powerful contrast between the wooden beams in the garage and the lit curving ceiling in the social area. We’ve also uploaded a video at the end of the post where you can observe how this residence was fully optimized for accommodating and maneuvering the vehicles. Have a look and tell us what you think!
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Shades of gray (and blue!) in an interior from T Magazine.
Nothing says 'cool' quite like the perfect gray. Whether you prefer a barely-there almost-white or a deep charcoal, there's a shade of gray here for you. Read on for more inspiring interiors.
You absolutely do NOT want to watch the following video if you have not gone and seen Guardians of the Galaxy. The video below, put together by Mr. Sunday Movies, points out all the Easter Eggs in the Guardians movie. It contains spoilers… lots of them.
Watching this there were a few Easter eggs that I missed.
New Canadian citizens are issued a Cultural Access Pass that gives them a year’s worth of free admission to over 1,000 of Canada’s museums and other cultural institutions.
The terms “public toilet” and “seaside periscope” don’t usually go hand in hand. However, Adam Wiercinski has drawn inspiration from the location of his project in Gdynia, Poland, on the coast of the Baltic Sea to create a concept for a building that both mimics and observes. Choosing to focus on extensive views over the sea front, Wiercinski aimed to imbue users with a sense of tranquility by designing a serene public facility embodying the powerful, elemental nature of the sea.
The stripped down, monolithic concrete is grounded solidly in the landscape, while the gracefully curved arcade resembles the breakwater nearby. The shape itself thus seamlessly works as a transition between building and landscape, while extended walking paths create accessibility and a promenade entry sequence. Designed to maximize views, the facility features an open tribune between the men’s and women’s toilets as a space for pause and reflection, providing room to gather and view the Baltic Sea.
The materiality serves to further reinforce the raw, coastal nature of the Periscope’s location. Strong concrete exteriors extend into the interior as concrete walls, balanced by a warm wood finished tribune. The ground beneath the Periscope is strewn with large pebbles, reflecting the natural materiality of the seaside breakwaters. Windows are foregone in favor of the the periscope form itself, and an upper mirror is placed 4 meters above the ground, reflecting sunlight inward in order to blur the barrier between interior and exterior, and eliminate distracting views of tourist pedestrians and vehicles.
Snorlax bed which looks like an adorable Snorlax creature from the Pokemon universe comes with the arms and legs already filled with cotton, and the head and body deflated All you have to do is buy your own cotton, stuff it, zip it up, and voilà–your very own Snorlax. This funky bed was designed and createdby Catherine Kim, the creator of famous Knight Armor Hoodies.
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![architecture project contemporary house design 2 Bedroom House in Washington Centered Around a 16 Car Garage [Video]](http://cdn.freshome.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/architecture-project-contemporary-house-design.jpg "architecture project contemporary house design")
Despite its impressive exterior dimensions, this West Bellevue House in Washington, USA features only two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The owners probably thought too much living space would in time lead to boring maintenance problems, so they decided to center their home around a giant garage. Discovered by Freshome on Redfin, this unconventional residence (priced $4 million !) has enough space to accommodate 16 cars. It also comes with a practical car lift and a fully stocked workshop.![design project contemporary house 2 Bedroom House in Washington Centered Around a 16 Car Garage [Video]](http://cdn.freshome.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/design-project-contemporary-house.jpg "design project contemporary house")
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TiVo has taken the TV-watching to a new, insane dimension with the Mega, a rack-mountable, 24TB DVR that will cost around $5,000. That trumps its current flagship Roamio Pro's 4TB storage by sixfold and makes it look quaint in comparison. Like that...
