Everyone must have seen African tin toys made from reused tin cans, and the wire frame type that are often rather unsettling in their ghostliness. The toy influence is obvious when you see this. It’s the maquette for a much larger work that seems to have been made in a similar way from even bigger [...]
It’s beautiful, but we can find very little about it. What we do know is that it is the adaptive reuse of Schloss Rothschild, Umbau, Austria as a museum by the Viennese Pritzker Prize winning architect Hans Hollein (who has an excellent website with NO FLASH!) and it is due to be finished in 2007. [...]
We’ve talked about spam before but this time it’s Spam, the real thing, if you can say that about Spam. The Spam Museum is in an adaptively reused K-Mart, appropriately enough. It’s in Austin, Minnesota, “otherwise known as Spam Town, USA” (but not to us). The museum also houses the offices of the Hormel Food [...]
Here is proof that the silly season, when we celebrate the cult of consumerism, is almost upon us again. We all know how the beer goggles can get us into trouble, and never more so than at this time of year. Perhaps wearing real beer goggles during this orgy of materialism and false bonhomie may [...]
….not really, they are made of pop tops from aluminium cans, but they are made by a partnership called Escama, which means fish scales in Portugese. The three partners are based in San Francisco and Brasilia, Brazil, and all have day jobs. They apparently developed and market the bags that are made by Cia do [...]
Antipode is one of those sites that is so pretentious that it’s impossible to work out what it’s actually on about although it’s fairly clear that it’s showcasing contemporary jewellery. But we really like the work of one of the featured artists, David Poston, who reuses tin cans. The world is full of adaptively reused [...]
“The Bucket Seat by Carl Clerkin makes moving your stool quick and easy!” is what they say on UrbanPeel where we found this. So there you go, another of life’s pressing issues resolved. Nonetheless, made of one chair seat, three mop handles and one bucket handle, the Bucket Seat is an elegant little collection of [...]
It’s one thing to write about converting 747s into mansions but ultimately that’s only for an extremely wealthy minority. Homelessness is endemic throughout the world and in the US alone approximately 3.5 million people are estimated to experience homelessness at some point annually, a million of them children. Extremist right wing governments have exacerbated the [...]
Although the essay in its adapted blog form is not yet the essay of Bacon, Montaigne, Addison or Orwell you can nonetheless see what may lie in the future as the form refines itself. Brief and pointed, visual as well as literary, loaded with allusion and subterranean complexity via links, and potentially collaborative and open [...]
1964… it seems millenia ago. The American Empire had reached its zenith and the few things that were starting to go wrong seemed like minor glitches although the massive humiliation of defeat in Vietnam was soon to define the limit of US power. In that year New York hosted a World Fair at Queens in [...]