“Man can better set up in a small house than in a huge castle.” - Leo N. Tolstoy

“With the loved ones you can be happy even in the smallest of places.” - Leo N. Tolstoy.

July 03, 2010 by Designsquish

Old workshop seat.

Coffee table from recycled cable drum.

Chair from old sewing factory.

Pillows from vintage produce sacks.

Images from ArtKraft Furniture and Design.

June 28, 2010 by Designsquish

Photos taken in Harriman State Park, NY + motylek (small butterfly)

by Designsquish

“Red List protects nature” - The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, founded in 1948, is the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species.

“Protect birds - they are doctors of the forest”

“Cut down one - plant ten”

“Welcome, my feathered friends!”

June 25, 2010 by Designsquish

Old bathtubs, shipping crates and barrels are great “upcycle material” for DIY planters.
Above: Old barrels as planters in San Diego, California.

Bathtub garden baskets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

Below: Shipping crate as garden planter.

by Designsquish

Sun Boxes  are installations by Craig Colorusso powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time.

The sounds of Sun Boxes have been described as both soothing and energizing. A unique combination of adjectives often used to describe yoga, or meditation. When experiencing the piece, Sun Boxes allows the participant to slow down, and notice the subtleties of the composition unfold. With the abundance of technology and hustle of this culture it is a much needed concept to not only be allowed, but also encouraged to slow down.

June 22, 2010 by Designsquish

June 17, 2010 by Designsquish

VerTerra’s disposable tableware is a great alternative to plastic and paper plates. It is made from fallen palm leaves and water only and biodegrades naturally within two months.

June 07, 2010 by Designsquish

Above: Willow branch chandelier. 

Above: Hickory Branch Chandelier.

Above: Hickory pendant light.

Handmade twig chandeliers inspired by nature.  Found in Collier West.

June 06, 2010 by Designsquish

Forest Floor Still Life by Otto Marseus Van Schrieck. Otto was a Dutch painter best known for mysterious dark close-ups of the live undergrowth of forest floors that give detailed views of
wild flowers, weeds, thistles, and mushrooms, lives of insects.

Even though it is not really a still-life, I think this painting is particularly amazing because of how still it is.

June 04, 2010 by Designsquish

Chair redesign by Jetske Groot.  Jetske finds old chairs, carefully disassembles them and recycles them into new chairs that reflect their past history. Jetske calls her series “Multiple Family”

June 01, 2010 by Designsquish

Book LED floor lamp. The lamp’s shade opens and closes like the cover of a book. As the shade opens wider, the light shines more brightly, and as it closes, it gradually dims and turns off. Made from recycled aluminum.

Simple, non-toxic, eco-friendly biodegradable coffin!

Eco-friendly chairs made from strawboard. (Strawboard, a formaldehyde-free material made of compressed straw- an alternative to wood particleboard or fiberboard)

Invisible Street Lights designed by Jongoh Lee are in the shape of tree leaves and can be wrapped around tree branches.  During the day, these leaf structures mingle in the tree’s natural leaves, harnessing and storing sunlight. At night, they provide a poetic alternative to streetlights. 

National Design Triennial is on right now at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York City.

May 28, 2010 by Designsquish

Scrap wood chair. (Perfect DIY idea)

Skateboard wheels rotating table. (Great idea for reusing skateboard wheels)

Button toy. (Great idea for reusing buttons)

Future Perfect is a good new design store in
Williamsburg and East Village, New York.

May 26, 2010 by Designsquish

Signe Parsegel land art.

Forest Art Wisconsin.

Michel de Broin “Superficial”

May 18, 2010 by Designsquish

Lamp made from scrub pads and chandelier made from
plastic spoons by Daisuke Hirawa.

Tiago Sa Da costa creates bowls and lamps out of natural material - cork. 

Hand knitted recycled cotton and leather bags by Lana Williams

Colorful, environmentally friendly wood blocks by Miller Goodman.

Scrap Lights made of recycled cardboard.

by Designsquish

Log speakers by Stanley Ruiz - http://stanleyruiz.com  Stanley’s speakers are composed of only wood and metal. “It is a very lo-fi, unassuming approach to product design.  Improvisation is a major part of my process” - Stanley.

Ceramic speakers by Joey Roth: 

The speaker system is reduced to its most simple form.  It is also made out of all natural materials consisting of porcelain, cork, and birch.

May 14, 2010 by Designsquish

Irina paints on old wood boards, closet and wardrobe doors, metal pieces or simply on rocks she finds.  Irina’s paintings remind of Russian Orthodox icons, Avant-garde 1910-1920 and Russian folk art.  She paints portraits of Russian writers, happy couples, books, subjects and objects from villages and dacha life.  Irina says: The objects I paint on are just means of expression but their past affects my paintings. I find them in the garbage ...or they find me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, portrait. 2004. Oil on reclaimed wood. From “Russian Writers” series.

Requiem. Series of portraits. 2000-2001. Oil on wood

Nikolai Semyonovish Leskov, portrait. 2004 from “Russian Writers” series.

Sugar. 2002. Oil on found metal.

Beloved vegetable garden. 1995. Oil on wood.

May 10, 2010 by Designsquish

Reused shipping crate shelves / drawers by Linda Jose.  Furniture designed to reuse shipping crates.

May 08, 2010 by Designsquish

April 26, 2010 by Designsquish

Sculpture by Michel de Broin made from discarded batteries.

April 19, 2010 by Designsquish

Located on the Rockaway Peninsula Brooklyn, NY, Fort Tilden is mostly a natual area that was a former United States Army installation.  Fort Tilden today is largely a natural area of beach, dunes and maritime forest. Most of the old military installations are abandoned, though some buildings have been renovated and are used by local arts groups. Atop one of the old batteries, Battery Harris East, is a viewing platform offering 360-degree views.  Fort Tilden includes some of the most secluded beaches in New York.

by Designsquish

“Biopsy” photograph series by Yedda Morrison

This work takes as its starting point the human desire for permanence, a desire made acute by the inevitability of our passing. If photography itself is a manifestation of this desire, our attempt to arrest or “still life,” plastic plants and flowers are a low-rent corollary. Suspended mid bloom and scattered throughout graveyards and empty parlors, they offer the promise of perennial youth, an eternal flowering, life ever after. Fake flowers both immortalize and render static the natural world. As such, they articulate a crisis between beauty and horror, desire and loss, artificiality and “the natural.” In our fall from the “pre” or “no” time of Eden, we have landed squarely in the artificial garden, the stilled remains of paradise. These sights of frozen or no time and the scale, duration and technology that make them possible, work to articulate a world where boundaries between the real and the artificial are increasingly blurred. If, in our contemporary moment, we are experiencing a gradual substitution of the machine for the body/mind, the image for the thing, and the simulation of the environment for the environment itself, then perhaps we are realizing Robert Smithson’s “frozen actuality,” the hallucinatory disjunction where “nothing is known but the impenetrable surfaces,” where “the artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature.”

April 13, 2010 by Designsquish

Old rusty bike found on garage sale restored and repainted in the Gzhel style of ceramics. Gzhel is a Russian style of ceramics which takes its name from the village of Gzhel and surrounding area, where it has been produced since 1802.

April 08, 2010 by Designsquish

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre park currently under construction on the Brooklyn waterfront in the vicinity of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. As of March 22, 2010 the first newly built section of the park, Pier 1, has been open to the public. !!!!!!!!!!!!

March 30, 2010 by Designsquish

Reused shipping crate wood for shelves, glasses and cups from grandma’s garage, flea market or thrift store and a few handmade ceramic bowls.
Done!

Image found on beautiful blog by Anna Rikje, photographer and musician from Germany currently living in New York City -  I Truly Like That.

by Designsquish

The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.

Above: Mohawk Dinosaur

Scientsts were able to assign color to individual feathers and thus work out color patterns for the entire fossil of Anchiornis huxleyi, a small, feathered, two-legged dinosaur that lived roughly 150 million years ago.  The animal would have weighed about four ounces (110 grams) and appears to have had a dark gray or black body and wings with some white feathers that gave it a stripe pattern, plus a reddish-brown crest and speckles on the face. ( Source:  New York Times and Discovery News)

by Designsquish

Early spring moss in upstate New York. 

March 21, 2010 by Designsquish

Sets of mismatched dining chairs. Life becomes much easier with mismatch!  Photos from Emma Blog, unpolished Life and Apartment Therapy.

March 10, 2010 by Designsquish

I see a lot of old beautiful bird cages in the garbage. I think I threw out a few as well a long long time ago. What I did not know is that they can be transformed into beautiful lamps. This re-purposed bird cage lamp above is by PSPCA ( Philadelphia Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).  The curtain will naturally diffuse the light acting as a lamp shade!

by Designsquish

International Women’s Day vintage spring and flowers postcards.  (С 8 Марта!)

March 08, 2010 by Designsquish