Hasta La Ideas

Whether you’re a global corporation or a Bond villain, a good way to convey to shareholders—or enemy spies you’re lecturing—that you intend to take over the world, is to have a metal representation of it in your headquarters.

Fair enough, you say, but on what page of the Staples catalog do Dr. Evil & Co. find these things? They don’t. They contact Matt Binns, the British designer/fabricator who founded Giant Globes Inc. Binns’ Chicago-based outfit produces aluminum representations of Earth ranging from three to ten feet in diameter, as well as flat, wall-mounted varieties up to ten feet wide.

The globes can be custom-ordered with built-in motors to rotate them, so you don’t have to stroll around to the back while explaining your plans to 007. And they’re naturally corrosion-resistant, which comes in handy if you want to place them outside (or for when Bond eventually gets out of his handcuffs and causes an explosion in the compound, triggering the sprinklers and/or blowing the roof open).

Fabricating these things isn’t easy, and takes a team of craftspeople about two weeks per, depending. But Binns, who refers to himself as a “Creative Generalist” and has a background in everything from furniture design to special effects work to our fave, building and running a beach bar on the Gulf of Thailand for two years, figured it out:

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