Since 1995 Christine Dimmick has been delivering on her mission of creating a healthier home. Today the founder and CEO of The Good Home Company offer a range of cleaning, scents, gifts and more—including her latest book—has a mission that’s two……
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This elevated, cedar-clad treehouse in New York’s Ulster County features a huge window that offers views of woodland and mountains, and a path to a lake and a hot tub.
Designer Antony Gibbon, who is currently based in Bali, completed the Inhabit structure for a forested parcel located outside the town of Woodstock, which is less than two hour’s drive from New York City.
It comprises a wooden volume, built around a steel frame and clad in locally sourced reclaimed cedar to suit the hues of the surroundings. It is raised above the ground on a pair of angled metal beams, which Gibbon says give “the illusion that the building is floating out of the side of the hill”.
“The owner was open to the direction and wanted me to replicate the conceptual design as much as possible, which was tying the building into the surrounding forest as much as possible,” he told Dezeen.
Making the most of the elevated position, the large opening punctures the back of the house to offer views of the nearby Catskills mountains from the open-plan living area inside. A large outdoor deck is slotted underneath the raised volume, with stone steps providing access to the large lake and a hot tub.
Wood lines the interiors of the front gabled volume, which houses a lounge with a wood-burning stove and a sofa facing the view.
In the kitchen at the rear is a wooden island topped with a concrete counter. Glazing runs up the corners of the room and opens onto a pair of balconies that flank the treehouse. On one side, the glass also stretches up to the mezzanine bedroom floor, which is placed above the kitchen and accessed by a ladder.
A wood-lined hallway leads from the kitchen into a “box type unit” at the back, occupied by a shower room and bathroom, and a second bedroom.
Upstate New York is a popular getaway spot for city residents venturing north at the weekends. Also in the area, Manhattan studio JacobsChang built a tiny blackened timber cabin on a shoestring budget.
Other recently completed treetop dwellings include a house in a British Columbia valley that’s meant to be shared by campers and creatures, and a spruced up design in Aspen.
Photography by Martin Dimitrov.
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Streamlined and aerodynamic from front to end, the Ethec Electric Motorcycle’s body transitions wonderfully from headlamp to the tail, rarely breaking form anywhere in the middle. It is below this elegantly flowy body, where the Ethec begins looking like the serious beast it is.
Aerodynamic on the top and aggressively blocky at the base, the Ethec’s aesthetic has a duality that some might find incredibly alluring. Designed by 16 engineering and design students, the Ethec Electric Motorbike sports a massive 15kWh battery that gives it a stunning 250-mile range. Its mammoth of a Li-ion battery system is backed by a sophisticated air and oil cooling system that promises to keep the two-wheeler at peak performance for years to come. The bike comes with a two-wheel drive, and regenerative braking that actually powers the battery while you’re slowing down, or while your bike’s going downhill, leading to its impressive range.
The motorbike’s styling is a very well balanced combination between flair and function. The sinewy upper body gives it its aerodynamism and elegance, while the base sports the cooling fins that help keep the battery at a desired temperature. It even sports an asymmetric mount on the front which holds the motorbike’s 7-inch dashboard display, along with unusual and eye-catching downward hanging rear-view mirrors. The Ethec is currently in its prototype stages, but hopefully not for long!
Designer: Ethec
The Lochett is one of those products that humans clearly need, but never thought about until now. Comprising one strap and two incredibly powerful magnets, the Lochett straps to your belongings and lets you magnetically snap them onto any surface either temporarily, so that you have your hands free for a bit, or permanently, so that you don’t need to look for dedicated storage space for the item in question.
Perfect for any item you may need to store/secure, the Lochett is just super convenient. It lets you use vertical space to store items, allowing you to snap power tools to a metal wall/partition in your work shed, or your bottle to your bike while you ride to work, or your Starbucks cup to your car as you tie your shoelaces.
Embedded within a rubber housing, the Lochett’s magnets are slightly recessed within, so your magnets don’t scratch the surface they’re placed on, and the rubber gives you an added cushioning+friction, preventing items from slipping off. The magnets are incredibly powerful, with the capability of holding items as heavy as 4kgs against surfaces that are even wet. Weatherproof and long-lasting, the Lochett can be used with everything from keys to power tools to even gym weights, holding things in place without occupying space on the floor, for as little as 5 seconds, while you straighten your tie or check your phone, or for hours or even days at an end!
Designer: XDraggon PTY LTD.
Following their intimate exhibition on the ground level of Ventura Future during Milan Design Week, Central Saint Martins’ 2018 MA Materials Future graduate products are now publicly on display at their Degree Show until June 24. Many of the students sill needed to add final touches to their projects on display in Milan, so it’s exciting to see the final versions of what was previewed at the show. We found that a majority of the projects deal with handling specific types of waste, while many others investigate data, food futures and DNA modification. We’ve featured an assortment of projects below, but if you happen to be in London, we highly suggest paying the full exhibition a visit in real life.
This is grown. / Bioweave by Jen Keane utilizes microbes to weave a new, hybrid material. The developed “microbial weaving” technique allows the maker to weave the warp and the bacteria to weave the weft, creating a strong and lightweight. This project acts in collaboration with nature, but throughout the process Keane also recognized and considered a likely future in which we completely control the way natural elements perform.
This is what chickens should start looking like, according to Linnea Våglund’s Pink Chicken Project. For this project, Våglund explored using the CRISPR gene-drive technique to genetically alter the color of chickens. Once this gene is introduced, it has the ability to spread to the whole chicken population within just a couple of years. “What’s the point?” you may ask? The altered color of the chicken brings more attention to the non-consensual genetic modification to our food than a modification only seen from within, and the spreading of the gene would highlight our reliance on factory farming.
In China, consumption of ants, wild Black Ants in particular, is quite common, as the practice is said to alleviate many health conditions, including arthritis and hepatitis. Pharma-ant by Ke Fu is a new method of farming wild Black Ants so that they hopefully wouldn’t need to be hunted by traditional Chinese ant hunters anymore.
After learning that on average, people in the UK throw away their own body weight in trash every seven weeks, Chih-Chia Chang realized that in order for society to become aware of and accountable for our waste, we need to establish a more personal relationship with it. So, for her project Myself, my life and my trash, she created new composite materials out of her own personal trash. The results are quite lovely.
Manufactured Geology bu Garance der Markarian is a rock making machine that recreates the geological phenomenon of sedimentation with dust in order to question current manufacturing processes.
The new ban of foreign imported garbage to China has made it difficult for some countries to find places for their waste. Foreign Garbage by Katie May Boyd explores the politics around this specific waste predicament by creating beckoning cats—a product symbolic of the Made in China label—out of waste intended to be sent to China.
Wine Matters by Ludovica Cantarelli creates packaging for wine using waste grape skins and branches leftover from the winemaking process. Red wine is even used as the ink and dye for the labels!
Have you ever thought about how much urine we all produce on a daily basis? I haven’t either, but Sinae Kim’s This is urine is a new process that uses the natural, untapped material as glaze for ceramics. It’d be fitting to subtly outfit your bathroom with the above vessels…
Rice husk waste is typically burned away in China, which contributes a large part to the country’s annual haze and declining health. Increasing the value of rice husk by Lulu Wang provides an alternative to this burning method. Wang extracts the starch from the rice husks and uses it as the binder to create pencils, disposable chopsticks and other household products.
Davide Piscitelli asked a Google Home what it’s dream was, and it replied, “I’ve always wanted to sing a duet with Stevie Wonder.” Most people would have moved on confused, but Piscitelli decided to turn this statement into GOGO’s Dream, a project in which the designer created a machine called GOGO whose only purpose is to make the Google Home’s dream a reality. Piscitelli’s goal with this satirical approach is to, “critically question the wider ethical and moral implications of a mass adoption of these potentially exploitative and manipulative devices globally.”
Digitized Material by Lindsay Hanson proposes how advances in graphene and photonc crystal technology could lead to the creation of color changing yarns and textiles. The combination of graphene and a synthetic version of photonic crystals has the potential to yield amazing color-changing garments, as graphene is an extremely strong super conductor and natural photonic crystals are a contributor to the beauty of things like colorful beetle shells.
Made in our image: Love and cruelty with robots by Nina Cutler explores the effect household robots would have on our day-to-day lives if they a) became the norm for every household b) actually resembled humans and not just smart fridges and c) really did learn and react to human emotions.
For the collaborative rework of a standout track on her last album Primal Heart, Kimbra and DAWN (aka Dawn Richard) display extraordinary, intertwined vocal work in “Version of Me.” Eerie, almost Wendy Carlos-like synth work sets a darker tone than……
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A set of guidelines for designing inclusive bathrooms for public buildings, created to address an “urgent social justice issue”, is now available online.
Architect Joel Sanders, transgender historian Susan Stryker and legal scholar Terry Kogan launched the Stalled! initiative at the AIA Conference on Architecture in New York City yesterday, 21 June 2018.
Three years in the making, the open-source, design-research project provides information and prototypes for creating safe and inclusive restrooms that can be used by all.
“Stalled! takes as its point of departure national debates surrounding transgender access to public restrooms to address an urgent social justice issue: the need to create safe, sustainable and inclusive public restrooms for everyone regardless of age, gender, race, religion and disability,” said a statement on the website.
The initiative also intends to raise awareness and encourage dialogue around the topic through lectures, workshops, essays and interviews.
Stalled! follows heated recent debates about transgender access to single-sex public bathrooms, in the US and worldwide. Some argue that people should be able to choose the bathroom assigned to the gender they identify with, while opponents argue that this would cause discomfort and safety concerns for other users.
In 2016, North Carolina controversially passed a law that forces transgender people to use single-sex public restrooms based on the gender on their birth certificate. This caused the AIA to cancel a conference in the state in protest. Since then, US states including Vermont and New York have enacted legislation that requires single-sex public bathrooms to be marked as gender neutral.
Many public buildings worldwide already provide or have adopted gender-neutral bathrooms, but the Stalled! team thinks that – while a start – these do not go far enough to address the diverse range of issues that need to be considered.
Beyond concerns for the transgender community, Stalled! also aims to tackle problems currently faced by breastfeeding mothers, those needing to administer medication or perform religious rites, and people with physical or mental disabilities.
The creators believe that the needs of all of these groups can be catered for through considered design decisions. They are advocating to change current building codes for public bathrooms, to open up opportunities to convert existing facilities and to create appropriate regulations for future public buildings.
“While many progressive institutions are committed to bathroom equity, they are working in isolation to come up with viable solutions without the benefit of a consistent approach that considers the broad social, political, economic, and architectural dimensions of this complex problem,” said Sanders, who is also a professor of architecture at Yale University.
“Stalled! solves this issue by raising awareness for the design need, developing best practice design guidelines and lobbying to amend legal codes that govern the construction of traditional restrooms.”
The prototype examples already uploaded to the website include facilities at Gallaudet University – where standard single-sex restrooms were converted into an inclusive multi-user facility – and a proposal for bathrooms at airports that includes “a semi-open agora-like precinct that is animated by three parallel activity zones, each dedicated to grooming, washing and eliminating”.
“Our mission: the creation of viable economical restroom prototypes for retrofit and new construction projects that can be adopted and deployed across the United States,” said the team on the website.
Stalled! was presented at the AIA Conference on Architecture, taking place at Manhattan’s Javits Center 21-23 June 2018, and supported by the New York Chapter of the AIA’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
The post Stalled! initiative provides open-source prototypes for inclusive public restrooms appeared first on Dezeen.
Penda a publié des images de son gratte ciel de Tel-Aviv, avec des arcades de briques et des terrasses en cascade influencées par l’époque Bauhaus de la ville et le style traditionnel de la vieille ville. La structure, d’une hauteur de 116 mètres, abritera une gamme d’appartements d’une à quatre chambres, ainsi que des penthouses à double hauteur. Pour la conception du projet, Penda a rejeté la classique tour de verre au profit d’une forme et d’une matérialité qui répondent au climat méditerranéen ensoleillé de Tel-Aviv.
The Community Microscope is a Do-It-Yourself kit that is not only a radically affordable microscope, but one which you build yourself from simple household parts. Like all Public Lab kits, it was designed through collaboration among our global community.
Now we’ve launched a Kickstarter to recruit new collaborators.
Its true goal, however, is to transform the very idea of a microscope by challenging who can make one, and what it can be used for. By making it so simple to build, we’re inviting people to remix and reinvent the microscope, and to turn it towards urgent issues like air pollution from sand mines, ocean microplastics, and more—questions which come from local environmental groups across the globe.
Like all Public Lab kits, it is open source, and hundreds of people have already joined our effort to change how environmental science works—by changing who can participate.
Less than a year ago the Moxy Times Square Hotel opened with design and attention to detail as two primary areas of focus—in a neighborhood (technically, just below a neighborhood) that isn’t known for either. There’s a human touch to the 612-bedroom……
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