For Metrobench, a sculptural installation created by Stephen Shaheen for the previously mentioned Single Fare 2: Please Swipe Again show at Sloan Fine Art Gallery, the artist asked New Yorkers to donate their used Metrocards via Craigslist. He then hand-stitched the 5,000 discarded cards into a usable bench that’s intended to represent the unifying nature of mass transit. “There is something very personal about handling so many small belongings that were once riding around in peoples’ pockets,” he explains. “There are untold personal stories in that inconspicuous, flimsy plastic.” Click through to get a better look.
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Judith and Richard Lang are a collaborative husband and wife team who use the plastic trash that they find on local NoCal beaches to make large sculptures, installations, photo tableaus, and jewelry. “In 1999 we started collecting plastic debris — carrying it away by the bagful — all from Kehoe Beach, a remote stretch of the Point Reyes National Seashore, in Northern California,” they explain on their website. “Certain items would catch our interest: milk jug lids, combs, toy soldiers, disposable lighters, cheese spreaders from lunch snack packs. We were attracted to things that would show by their numbers and commonness what is happening in the oceans around the world.”
View more images of their work — which is available for purchase as prints — after the jump.
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lumenHAUS — Virginia Tech’s entry to the 2009 Department of Energy Solar Decathlon — is a 600-square-foot steel-framed glass box with two layers of sliding panels. The inner panel is made up of polyethylene filled with expanded silica gel, a translucent and highly insulating material. The outer is a stainless steel weather screen with perforations that allow for sunlight penetration. Both adjust to optimize energy usage and can be controlled via an iPhone app. Did we mention that it’s currently sitting in the middle of Times Square? How cool is that?
Get a closer look after the jump.
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Remember when swimming in dumpsters became a fad in Williamsburg over the summer? Well our friends at Inhabitat just upped the ante, tipping us off to an entire city of made out of recycled shipping containers which recently sprang up about two hours outside of Mexico City. Along with a few residential apartments, the eco-friendly Container City houses restaurants, bars, shops, art galleries, and an open public area with ping pong tables. We want to live there. (Note: There’s also a Container City in London. As far as we can tell, they’re similar, but unrelated.) More images after the jump.
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What would happen if Katrina-style flooding hit New York City? Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, a new MoMA/P.S. 1 program, pairs four teams of architects, engineers, and landscape designers with four sites in New York and New Jersey’s Upper Bay and asks them to come up with designs that would minimize the damage of high storm surges and “provide new ground for recreation, ecologies, agriculture, and urban development.”
The eco-aware project was inspired by On the Water: Palisades Bay, a forthcoming book from Princeton University professor of structural engineering and architecture Guy Nordensen, as well as his independent research with ARO and landscape designer Catherine Seavitt. “The experience of Katrina taught us the value of wetlands,” he had said. “We need to start thinking positively about what we can do to address these scenarios.”
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Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan‘s Gyre, 2009 depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. He collected all of the plastic used in the image above from the Pacific Ocean. Detail shots after the jump. [via @core77]
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Thanks to our friends at GOOD we won’t be able to sleep tonight, so we thought we’d pay it forward. As they explain it, as of last Friday afternoon we’d exhausted our natural resources for this year; or in other words, as it stands “our collective global lifestyle would require 1.4 Earths to meet demand.” The image above is from Earth Overshoot Day 2008, which took place on September 23 — a whopping two days earlier. So that’s something.
How do you grow food when you don’t have any land? You opt for an ’86 Dodge pickup instead. In their upcoming documentary, filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis convert an old truck into a twelve-share Community Supported Agriculture project farm that grows produce and delivers it to your door. They also explore the complicated issues surrounding urban farming. The film won’t be out in January 2010, but in the meantime, check out the teaser after the jump. Read More »
Photo credit: Thomas Meggs
Over the weekend we headed to Union Square to check out Burning ICE, artist Chin Chih Yang’s interactive installation made from 21,000 pounds of ice meant to symbolize humans’ catalyzing effect on climate change. More images after the jump. Read More »
