Is That a Smoke Pencil in Your Handbag, or… ?
Housewives the world over are going crazy for two new energy saving devices that look more like something teenagers might hide under their mattresses. The Smoke Pencil and the Chimney Balloon are two very useful tools to air-seal your home, but they look a little dubious at first. Intrigued? We were. Let's find out what the scoop is...
Continue reading...The World On Sale: Swapping Dull Cityscapes For Exotic Destinations
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Imagine waking up in the shadow of the great pyramids, or on a palm studded beach in the Maldives with cool water lapping at your feet. With British Airways you can escape the dull cityscape this fall and travel to exotic destinations all over the globe for reduced prices during their November sale.
Continue reading...The Great War in Colour
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
On this day, ninety-one years ago, the guns that raged over the battlefields of Europe for more than four years fell silent. Never before had slaughter on such an industrial scale been conceived of, and never again would the lives of those who survived be the same again. Environmental Graffiti has compiled a collection of rare colour photographs, illuminating in grim detail the horrors of a war that set a precedent for bloody conflict in the twentieth-century.
Continue reading...The Legacy of Saddam’s Architecture of Fear
Monday, November 2, 2009
Empires rise and fall, but the physical foundations they lay remain like ghosts. Fifty years ago Baghdad had just three public sculptures. During the revolution mobs destroyed two of them, leaving just one dedicated to an obscure prime minister. Today Iraq proliferates with imposing monuments and lavish palaces. But what has become of this architecture of fear since the fall of Saddam?
Continue reading...San Francisco’s Incredible Stained Glass Salt Ponds
Thursday, August 6, 2009
‘Art imitates life’ – or so the old saying goes – but when the reverse appears true, as Oscar Wilde noted, the effect can be all the more striking. The vivid hues of the San Francisco Bay salt ponds remind us more of a crafted stained glass window than the sea’s naturally muted colour palette, and they produce some of the world’s most magnificent natural colourways…
Continue reading...The Incredible Light Shows of Niagara Falls
Monday, August 3, 2009
What do you get when you illuminate one of the world’s most spectacular waterfalls with nearly 5km of shimmering floodlights, over 125 animated displays and 3 million sparkling tree and ground lights? A dazzling extravaganza that will make you see the Niagara falls in a whole new light – and for those of you who can’t make it, we decided to take a closer look.
Continue reading...The Unstoppable Coal Fire Blazing Beneath Pennsylvania
Friday, July 31, 2009
In 1962, firemen in the Pennsylvanian mining town of Centralia successfully extinguished a minor blaze at a landfill dump – but little did they know a layer of coal just below the surface had ignited, creating a hidden and deadly inferno that raged undetected beneath the town for almost twenty years. This is the story of Centralia and the fire that refuses to be extinguished.
Continue reading...The Amazing Wooden Mirror [pics]
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Lying at the heart of this project is again a simple but deeply moving concept: the idea of everything around us acting as a mirror, or perhaps more precisely - making everything around us into a mirror onto the world. By using a naturally unreflective surface to create reflections, Rozen highlights not only the human beings incredible capacity for technical accomplishment, but the fact that every object in the world might reflect, in some sense, the image of those who have crafted, used and sold it.
Continue reading...The Terror Blob Strikes Venezuela!
Monday, August 4, 2008
The roads are deathly quiet. Antonio Perez's shabby old taxi carefully makes its way along the main highway into Caracas. Yet terror is only yards ahead. A looming shape becomes visible through the gloom and Perez, who drives these roads every day, knows exactly what it is - he swerves, losing control of the car, sparks go flying...
Continue reading...The Awesome Way To Recycle a Dumpster [pics]
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Goldsmith's design graduate, Oliver Bishop-Young, unveiled two interesting proposals for the re-use of dumpsters (or skips as they're called in the UK) at the New Designers' festival earlier this month - but would you have lunch in a dumpster, or more to the point, would you swim in one? The first proposal is for a website where people can share information about the contents of their skip and others can salvage it (demo now online).
Continue reading...
Friday, November 13, 2009
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