Architecture Lessons 101

Applause

new Lady Gaga song i might use for my presentation video.. could work with the 'performance' theme :)

PINCH BY SAWDUST BUREAU --- i quite love this!

The Melbourne-based Sawdust Bureau crafts handmade, limited edition pieces of furniture with a stellar attention to the small details. One of their designs, Pinch, is both a coffee table and a bench seat that was cleverly inspired by a classic burlesque performer. - very non literal !
The piece is made to both conceal and reveal – a narrow, shadowy space to stash your less intellectual reading materials, like gossip rags, while the other end let’s you proudly display your latest issues of Time or The Economist.

"Pinch revels in the fact that it is infinitely more tantalizing to conceal than to reveal."
The overall shape is a rectangular loop that’s been “pinched” to form the two spaces of storage. A cylindrical concrete leg holds the one side up while one of the corners of the former rectangle becomes the other base. Built from reclaimed Jarrah and Victorian Ash, the wooden slats are finished with a traditional Danish oil. Pinch is being produced in a limited edition run of 20 with each being individually stamped with an edition number.

Missing Concrete :(

I really miss working with concrete floors! this timber floor structure is meh!

Coloured poop :P from the design indaba aaages ago

'E. chromi Designer Bacteria'    Will Color Your Poop According to What Ails You

Read more: E. chromi Designer Bacteria Will Color Your Poo According to Your Illness | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

E. chromi is an experimental collaboration between designers and scientists working in the field of synthetic biology. Royal College of Art graduates’ James King and Daisy Ginsberg, together with University of Cambridge’s iGEM 2009 Biology team, are developing a cheap, personalized disease monitoring system that works from the inside out. By color-coding diseases and giving a patient an E. Coli bacteria-engineered drink — much like a probiotic shake — sick patients could soon find out what ails them by simply checking the colour of their poop!

The Exorcise Pool

This Futuristic Pool Cleans New York’s Polluted Water, Then You Swim In It

If the Exorcise Pool has its way, you’ll be taking a dip in cleaned water from Newtown Creek, one of the city’s dirtiest waterways.

As you approach the edge of the trendy, industrial Brooklyn neighborhood of East Williamsburg, you one smell what divides it from Queens... sewage. That plus oil and other industrial contaminants make the three and a half miles of the Newtown Creek one of the most polluted watersheds in New York City.

But architect Rahul Shah has a solution... Build a swimming pool.

The Exorcise Pool, proposed as Shah’s master’s thesis at Parsons School of Design, wouldn't use water directly from the Newtown Creek, but its water supply would be the same, and its purpose is both to mitigate and reveal the woeful state of local water pollution.

Right now, storm water combines with sewage in a pipe-overloading combination that sends over a billion gallons of wastewater into the creek each year. Shah’s project would divert an estimated 76,000 cubic feet per year of that run-off into “bioswales”: ravines full of cattails, bulrush, and algae that would both absorb and carry water downhill. “They’re a series of plantings that can absorb toxins and, kind of the nasties of the water,” says Shah.

Water not absorbed by the plants would be carried to a series of water treatment technologies, using everything from algae to UV light to a bed full of reeds that will help trap solids. “I really wanted it to be kind of a showcase of different methods of water treatment,” says Shah. But he didn’t want to refine water to the point of drinkability. “It would be like pond-quality water,” he says.

The provocative main attraction is what it does with that pond-quality storm runoff, which starts with a patio full of misters. “That’s kind of like a moment of faith that everyone has to take once they enter the project,” says Shah. “They’re like, ‘Okay, this water is coming from the street and the rooftops around here, but it’s been treated well enough that I’m going to take a shower in it.’”

After the first tentative, misty steps, visitors can dive into a public pool of the stuff.

Of course, Shah’s project isn’t likely to happen any time soon, but considering the success of pools made out of garbage dumpsters, it shouldn't matter that New Yorkers would be scared by a little Williamsburg grime.

Link on full story :)

I know...but it's worth it :)

I know Heather would prefer it if we didn't all put puppies and kitties on our blogs, but i would put up work if i could get 5 minutes of work done with my new little terror in the house. This is my baba, Axel, Boston Terrier, food lover, flat nose snorter, attention taker and all round bad-ass.