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Still in its early stages, The Design Encyclopedia is a user-built wiki-style resource that has the potential to be an essential tool for student and professional designers alike.
Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu make computer generated architectural and floral forms using variables from junk e-mail.
CBS is advertising its Fall season on eggs. From CNNmoney.com comes this helpful quote:"We recognize that viewers have busy lives and with 'egg-vertising' we have found a great way to reach them out of their homes and in their daily lives, but in a way that also brings the message back into their home - and literally onto the kitchen table," said George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group, in a statement.Read more here.
We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.Read the entire letter and commentary here.
Recycled tires are being used as a more flexible substitute to concrete for sidewalks. From the Christian Science Monitor article:Some 130,000 square feet of rubberized sidewalks grace about 60 North American cities, giving local governments an alternative to concrete and its attendant pitfalls, such as rising prices, exorbitant trip-and-fall lawsuits, and a trail of chopped-down urban trees.Read the entire article here.
...Unlike concrete, which is poured and set on location, the prefab rubber squares arrive from its California factory and are cut to fit. Installers usually place Rubbersidewalks pavers over a bed of crushed granite and connect the pavers using interlocking dowels. The result: a sidewalk with a two-inch-deep footprint - far shallower than its concrete cousins. To repair a rubber sidewalk, workers simply unlock the dowels and remove the individual paver.
Each square foot of rubberized sidewalk contains almost one discarded tire. Americans generate about 290 million waste tires a year, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association in Washington - many of which languish in junk yards or are burned.
Read the entire article here.At Greensprings, where a plot costs $500 plus a $350 fee to dig the grave, bodies cannot be embalmed or otherwise chemically preserved. They must be buried in biodegradable caskets without linings or metal ornamentation. The cemetery suggests locally harvested woods, wicker or cloth shrouds. Concrete or steel burial vaults are not allowed. Nor are standing monuments, upright tombstones or statues.
Only flat, natural fieldstones are permitted as grave markers (they can be engraved). Shrubs or trees are preferred.
And only one person is allowed in each 15-foot-by-15-foot plot.
"This is more than just dig a hole in the woods and roll them in. We see it as a natural return to the Earth, becoming part of the circle of life," said Mary Woodsen, a lifelong conservationist and the cemetery's president.
It seems someone at the Secret Antiperspirant company reads blogs, since their new campaign "What's Your Secret" appears to be a direct ripoff of the popular PostSecret site.In his two-car garage, Kevin Newman is pouring used French fry oil from local restaurants into a pair of General Electric household water heaters - his version of the giant petroleum cracking towers found at an oil company refinery. He deftly moves hoses around, scrubs the impurities from the oil, performs chemical tests, and, voilˆÝ, a week later, he is filling-up his pickup truck with biodiesel. He figures his home refinery saves him and his business, which has six trucks, about $1.75 a gallon."If you can bake a cake, you can make biodiesel," says Mr. Newman.
With diesel at $3 a gallon, 50 cents more than last year, ingenious Americans like Newman are turning their garages and basements into mini-refineries. Websites publish instructions, community colleges offer classes, and biodiesel adherents give tours touting the improvement in exhaust emissions. Country and Western star Willie Nelson has his own "fresh farm biodiesel." Companies casually sell the equipment to turn used cooking oil into diesel as if owning your own refinery is part of the American dream.
Read the entire article here.
Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee drew their data from the British Household Panel Survey, which has monitored 10,000 adults in 5,500 households each year since 1991 and is regarded as an accurate tracker of social and economic change. Among parents with two children who voted for the Left (Labour or Lib Dem), the mean number of daughters was higher than the mean number of sons. The same applied to parents with three or four children. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.
But it was the ’Äúswitchers’Äù who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.
Read the entire article here.
Many hospitals are ’Äúbuilt catastrophes, anonymous institutional complexes run by vast bureaucracies, and totally unfit for the purpose they have been designed for,’Äù writes Dutch architectural historian Cor Wagenaar in The Architecture of Hospitals, an international collection of groundbreaking studies, essays and hospital design plans published this summer by the Netherlands Architecture Institute. ’ÄúThey are hardly ever functional, and instead of making patients feel at home, they produce stress and anxiety.’Äù
The consequences can be serious. Recent studies show that stress may hinder healing by intensifying pain, suppressing the immune system and causing heart problems, insomnia and depression. By inadvertently heightening patients’Äô stress, hospitals may be undermining patients’Äô recovery.
The transformation is already happening at places like the new Rikshopitalet University Hospital in Oslo, Norway, where architects designed a large facility on a human scale inspired by the comforting layout of a traditional village. ’ÄúTo promote health is to promote security and well-being,’Äù writes Arvid Ottar, chief architect of the new hospital. ’ÄúFor us, such feelings are linked strongly to the feeling of recognition. We felt that our solution lay more in the domain of town planning than architecture.’Äù
A McDonald's in Whittier on Friday became the first in California to open an R Gym - a new play area that has stationary bicycles, basketball hoops, an obstacle course and other exercise activities aimed at getting children to work off calories consumed at the fast-food chain.
The nation's first R Gym opened at a McDonald's in Tulsa, Okla., in March. Eventually R Gyms will spring up at McDonald's restaurants around the country, replacing the old play areas that featured plastic tube runs and slides, officials said.
One unique feature is an interactive video game that lets children peddle along with characters on a videoscreen while exercising on a stationary bicycle.
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Sara Terry, gives a perspective from inside a Burqa in Afghanistan using her cell phone camera. From her Backstory article in the Christian Science Monitor:As odd as it may sound, I thought that a burqa might be the answer to my problems. Here on a five-week assignment to shoot photos for a humanitarian organization, I was dismayed to realize that I wasn't going to be able to move freely. There was a standing threat against Western women working for aid organizations - prime targets for kidnapping and sale to the Taliban. Understandably enough, the organization restricted my movements, rarely allowing me out on the street unless I was in a car - and never allowing me to go anywhere alone.Read the entire article here.
In this quintessential 1950’Äôs tract community about 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family’Äôs front yard from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash plants, cornstalks, millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons, dwarf curry trees and about 195 other edible varieties has been startling.Read the entire article here.’ÄúThe empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding previously on this location has been removed,’Äù reads a placard set amid veggies in oval planting beds fronting the street.
The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second and most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental project by Fritz Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz Frederick Law Olmsted. The project, which he inaugurated on the Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a front yard in Salina, Kan., is part of a nascent ’Äúdelawning’Äù movement concerned with replacing lawns around the country with native plants, from prairie grasses in suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.
ALR Design: an underdog trying to bring integrity and political conscientiousness to branding and advertising (and being largely ignored).Many thanks to whomever thought we were worth mentioning (despite being largely ignored)!
Architecture students in Halifax, Nova Scotia, created a hamster wheel style park to encourage people to talk about the lack of public green spaces in their city.
