The average U.S. family spends $1,900 a year on the energy bills. By using less energy to keep your home comfortable, you not only spend less money, you also cause fewer greenhouse gases to enter the atmosphere, and ultimately contribute to slowing down global warming.
On Monday, May 22, the EPA’s Energy Star launched a new interactive online tool for improving energy efficiency at home. You can click on each room in the house to get specific tips on how to be smarter about the energy you use.
Dutch designer Damian O’Sullivan, has found a way to bring sunlight indoors with his Solar Lampion. The ingenuous lamp is composed of 36 standard-sized solar cells that collect sunlight during the day, and then shine at night. What we love about the Solar Lampion is that through simple geometric arrangement, it manages to transform something that is usually so bulky and ugly (solar panels) into a charming sculptural object. The fact that it is practical and energy efficient only makes it that much better. While it’s durable enough to keep outside - the Solar Lampion is so cute that we think you’ll want to bring it indoors to light up your summer nights.
Incandescent lighting is so taken-for-granted in contemporary culture that most of us have no idea how much energy we use when we flip a light switch. Boiler Design Office wants to change this with their experimental Protea Lamp - a lamp which changes shape based on how hot the bulb gets.
The Protea lamp is thermotropic: meaning it moves away from heat. When the light is off, the petal-like lampshade is cold and closed around the bulb. When the lamp is turned on and heats up, the thermotropic petals gradually move away from the hot bulb - opening up like a flower in the sunshine.
Brooklyn-based Pratt seems to be the school of choice for New York designers, and is currently producing some of the most cutting-edge industrial design in the country, when it comes to new technology and environmental sustainability. According to Design Intelligence (DI), a monthly architecture and design journal, Pratt’s Industrial Design Department is number two in the country - outranked only by California’s Art Center College of Design.
Here’s a great spring project to get you ready for those up-coming summer barbeques: grow your own lawn furniture with the Terra Grass Armchair kit. All you need to do is assemble a cardboard frame, fill it with soil, seed it with grass, then stand back and watch it bloom. In just a couple weeks, a green and grassy armchair will appear in your lawn!
Imagine a house without a single light fixture - but instead walls, ceilings, furnishings, and accessories all sources of light. Thanks to research at Princeton University and the University of Southern California (USC), almost any surface in a building can become a light source with OLEDs.
Although slightly larger than most objects we feature on Inhabitat, this sensual skyscraper located west of Toronto was just too beautiful to pass up. Developers in Mississauga, Canada recently announced the winner of the Absolute Design Ideas Competition for a fifty-plus story residential tower. Although no sustainable measures have been announced for the building itself, this high density development will allow 1,800 families to live, work, and shop all within walking distance. Besting 90 other entries, the Beijing architecture firm of MAD won the commission to design this elegant $120 million structure. Already dubbed the “Marilyn Monroe building” by the press, this flagship structure is slated for completion in 2010.
By no means was this the only design of note. We found several other designs had amazing promise from both aesthetic and environmental standpoints. Check out a few of the more intriguing designs:
We are really excited about the potential of Zenkaya, a great new prefab out of South Africa that has been making the rounds lately. Based on the idea of providing “a headache free process with cutting edge design,” Zenkaya literally references a Zen approach to housing (kaya meaning “home” in the vernacular South African language.)
Anyone who reads Inhabitat regularly will know that we are suckers for furniture with foliage. Julian Lwin has caught our attention before with his fabulously green, wheatgrass-studded Galapagos Coffee Table. Now the Brooklyn based designer is raising the bar again with his new biodegradable BioTube Bench. Thats right - we said it: BIODEGRADABLE FURNITURE!
This past weekend at ICFF, we were treated to several new stunning kirei pieces from Iannone:Sanderson. The most attention-grabbing was this Signature 2 cabinet, which has a beautiful “birds-and-the-bees” pattern on the front, and fully-exposed kirei lining the interior. Michael Iannone and James Sanderson also showed several new plyboo cabinets and sideboards, in addition their old beautiful standby - the Bamboo Glowbox. Iannone:Sanderson’s work has such clean precision and spare but original details, we could fill up a whole room with it and never feel bored or crowded.
Now that New York Design week is officially over, we are finally getting a chance to breathe and start writing non-ICFF posts again. For those of you who are tired of hearing about furniture - this is good news for you. But before we get back to business as usual, we want to wrap up design week by sharing our overall impressions of ICFF 2006.
Reclaimed wood furniture is usually so predictable: large beams or slabs of driftwood turned into benches and stools. Thats why Brent Comber’s unique reclaimed wood furniture - made from bundles of small irregular pieces - is such a breathe of fresh air. We discovered the Canadian designer’s innovative, eco-friendly furniture last year at ICFF, and it was one of our favorite things in the show. This year we are excited to see Brent Comber back and better than ever, with a beautiful new line of work called “Shattered”.
This weekend HauteGREEN opened with a flourish. The space looked beautiful, full of innovative and thoughtful explorations of sustainable design for the home, including a brand new piece from Scrapile, and an art installation of recycled water bottles from Tobias Wong and Josée Lepage. Here are my photos from the show and party. For photos of ALL the work check out our flickr feed at:
Danish designer, Mads Hagstrom, director of The FLOWInstitute at Dansk Design Centre, brought a show-stopping installation to ICFF. FlowMarket sits in the middle of the exhibit floor, enclosed in a sheer white curtain. The booth is set up as a store, but the products on the shelves are empty containers with generic labels addressing the plagues of consumer culture.
Sunday night we attended the Mobile Living event, which proved to be a smashing example of a well-conceived hybrid exhibition. The theme “mobile living” took a comprehensive view, including not just mobile homes, but cars (of which there were two new models on the floor), furnishings, and supposedly even apparel, though we didn’t see it.
In the last few years, knitting and crocheting have made a real come-back. These are no longer old lady sports, and all kinds of type-A execs and supercool hipsters have knitting circles to prove it. When well done, yarn art is lovely. And Cai’s croched lights are downright fabulous.
We were drawn like moths to these illuminated orbs yesterday at ICFF, which emerge from the same design team as the deer head trophy lamps Jill raved about after last year’s show. Essentially, the Stocking Lamps are clear spheres containing a lightbulb on a cord fed down through the top, around which fit perfectly gorgeous crocheted cozies. Isabelle Rolland, one of the Cai design trio, gave us a demo on how the covers can be unbuttoned and swapped out for new colors and patterns. We could gush about these for days.
We are already feeling overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of good stuff on display everywhere this week, but we are not going to give up until we’ve looted and plundered all the best of Design Week for Inhabitat. Here is what we’ve seen so far on day one at ICFF:
We’ve recently become fans of Chicago-based Materious Design, ever since discovering their clever Cubby and innovative Wifi Umbrella. Now, today at the Haute Green exhibition in Brooklyn, we discovered yet another winning design from Materious: the gorgeous Bone Lamp.
On display at the Mobile Living Conference this weekend will be a series of inflatable structures from UK-based company Inflate.
Given how we gravitate towards a good bouncy air castle, we were thrilled to discover Inflate’s work. Within the medium of inflatability, the firm’s portfolio is incredibly diverse. Their custom work includes interior decor, habitable prefabs, and large event structures that resemble yurts, turtle shells and igloos.
All bouncy fun aside, inflatable structures can be incredibly useful in disaster situations, and any time when someone needs shelter that can be erected in a matter of minutes. Most are made of high-strength textiles that can withstand a variety of outdoor weather conditions. And of course the playful appeal of inflatable structures can’t be denied. READ MORE >
We are a sucker for anything using Kirei board, so we were delighted last weekend at BKLYN Designs to discover the material in new form - in Object Interior’s lovely Coup Dresser.
The Coup Storage System combines beautiful modern lines with environmental sustainability by using 100% recycled and renewable materials. The dresser is composed of Kirei board, recycled steel, and recycled paper, and comes in a variety of different colors and sizes. If orange is a little too much for you, you can also get the sides in white, black, grey, and blue. (Custom colors are also available). I want one!
Did you ever have one of those lamps as a kid with a cut-out shade that cast silhouettes on the wall? Something about the combination of light and imagery could magically transport you to a more ethereal place. Artist-turned-lighting designer Andrea Claire has a sophisticated take on this idea, turning landscape photographs into lovely cylindrical lamps.
The idea seems deceptively simple: take a panoramic nature photograph, bend in a circle, afix to the inside of a linen lampshade. Yet the craft of the lamps, together with the beauty of the chosen images illustrate the designer’s unique vision.
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