My office recently bought a couple nifty Brompton fold-up bikes for the staff which are pretty cool but what about a bending bike that becomes it’s own lock? We’ll just put aside the thought of what might happen should you take a spill. Some text from Design Boom:

Design student kevin scott designed this unusual bending bike that not only folds up tightly but can be used to locks itself up. The de montfort university industrial design student designed the bike to make its safer and easier to lock up your bike in the city. His design looks like a normal bike when in riding mode, but a simple level on the frame triggers the frame to go from rigid to pliable. A ratchet system built into the frame enables the bike to simple be bent around a pole fitting one side of the handle bar into a closure under the seat, locking the bike in place. The design just won runner-up for the business design centre new designer of the year award at new designers. Scott will be using his prize money to further develop the bike, building more iterations for a full testing of its viability.

images via Design Boom

A trip to the ocean with another couple allowed us to score a really cool vacation beach house, obviously owned by some sort of designer that probably built many things themselves. There were a lot of great details throughout with great uses of wood and metal, like the ledge in front of the fireplace in the image below. A nautical theme ran throughout expressed through clean lines and interesting use of materials like the image above where metal cleats where attached to a wood strip for use as coat hooks. This detail was also in the bathrooms for towels.

The house actually sat along the edge of a lake just a block inland from the ocean and in an effort to reduce the disturbance along the lake edge, the house was raised up on metal beams, allowing the natural vegetation flow underneath with a simple gravel path to the staircase leading up to the entry deck.

A rain chain connects the roof to the ground with a stone splash block…

The deck leading to the canoe launch didn’t take out any trees…

The gravel driveway and the vegetated swale…

There were also some fun pieces of art and furniture. My favorites were the chair at the entry that was a simple piece of metal with a strip of tan leather through the top for a seat and especially the fabulous set of 3 paintings of frying eggs in the kitchen.

I happened upon this piece of unique art piece during a recent trip to my hometown of Port Angeles and I thought it was so simple and lovely. This resident installed an old bike wheel upon one of the poles on his chain link fence and attached some glasses to it in order to catch the wind. When it spun in the light breeze it was really quite lovely, especially when it hit the sunlight.

Beware that if you have your sound on, the ferry was leaving right as I shot the video thus picking up the very loud blast of the horn.

One of the things that really struck me about Europe is that the ideaof water conveyance channels right out in the open urban world was not only ok but rather frequently seen. Some are old, some new, but either way they flow right through plazas, down pedestrian alleyways and along sidewalks, promenades and public transit streets like beautiful features rather than ugly hazards to be hidden away.

A great example is in the city of Freiburg, Germany, a city on the edge of the Schwartzwald, or Black Forest. These channels can been seen in most of the streets and alleyways within the old city and are called the Bächle, which means “stream” in German. This is appropriate as it is like an urban stream network which is filled with the water from the river Dreisam. The Bächle however is a very old feature and in fact goes back to at least the 13th century and was used as water supply source for the city, bringing in fresh water from the stream running from the nearby mountains. Now, this fresh water serves as a great place to sit and dip your feet as either a local or a tourist in the warmer months.

The Bächle once used to flow right down the middle of the streets but once cars began infiltrating the city they were seen as inconvenient and were moved to the edge. Some were covered due to their non-use in the modern day city. However, in 1973 the heart of the city was paved in stone and nmed a pedestrian-only core and thus traffic was no longer a threat to the Bächle, or vice versa, and were therefore uncovered and could be enjoyed as a lovely feature among a pedestrian urban center and even live in harmony with the tram.

images via: petits poemes en prose, Laszio, kawanua,

Is it July already? Sure wouldn’t know it given the weather. But while it may not be the most spectacular summer for us people, the plants are loving the extra rain. The image above was taken while walking through my new neighborhood in Seattle where people love wild and crazy plants in place of the boring lawn in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. I only had my phone on me at the time of walking around and admiring the various creative things people have chosen to plant but I’ll go out again with my real camera and capture a good smattering. There are some great little urban gardens as well.

Speaking of the “new neighborhood in Seattle”, that’s why the blog has been fairly dead lately. It was a crazy packing and moving up from the Portland area but then extra crazy when the first location (and landlord) in Seattle was rather less than awesome and I ended up moving again to my current location. Luckily the current house is fabulous and I think I’ll be here for awhile. I’ve only been in the new house for a week so things are still a gigantic sea of boxes but soon I won’t be spending my spare time unpacking and I can instead enjoy some quality time with my laptop and get back to finishing the long list of drafts I’ve got piling up.

Have a happy 4th everyone!

It reminded me of a recent post earlier this month from Abitare regarding some bikers who decided to throw a several gallons of colorful paint at the entrances to the intersection at the busy Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin. The cars then would drive through these massive puddles of color and make lines with their tires through the intersection that would trace their movement as they went on their way. While this doesn’t trace the total movement of cars, it makes for a pretty intersection piece at least that helps to gain a feel for the specific traffic intersections and flow.

This reminds me of a previous post on active paths and desire lines which referenced a little invention for the bicycle called the Contrail. The idea behind this invention is to have a device that stays with the bike to map out it’s path in real time versus being place specific and requiring the user to pass through. Instead the Contrail helps to map the path instead of the space.

What I think would be really interesting is to map out vehicular, bicycle and pedestrian in a manner like the Contrail in a way that could be stored as data but seen visually, even if only online, to help understand how the different modes interact, where problem areas are and where it looks and feels as though the three work together harmoniously. That and it would be really nifty to look at.

images via Abitare

Just as I believe there is essentially a soundtrack for everything, each day has its own unique sound as well. I believe the world moves to the sound of music…or is it, the sound of music moves the world? Designer Craig Colorusso agrees and attempts to create a soundscape that moves with the elements of the day, powered entirely by the sun. This installation piece is titled Sun Boxes and a video of the piece in action as well as a description from the artist is below.

“Sun Boxes are an environment to enter and exit. It’s comprised of twenty speakers operating independently each powered by solar panels. There is a different guitar sample in each box all playing together making the composition. The guitar samples are all of different lengths so the whole piece keeps evolving.”

“There are no batteries involved. The Sun Boxes are reliant on the sun. When the sun sets the music stops. The piece changes as the length of the day changes. Making the participants aware of the cycle of the day.”

The picture above is of the sheet metal panel covered organic walls of the Experience Music Project building by Frank Gehry. I shot this will walking through the Seattle Center on my way from Queen Anne to downtown during some amazing sunny weather in my soon-to-be new home. That’s right, I’m in the process of moving up North to the Emerald City!

Posts lately have been spotty and few while things have been a bit busy over the last couple months but once the move is complete and I’m sitting happily in my new home in the Greenlake neighborhood, things will return to normal. Till then, posts will likely continue to be spotty but look forward to more posts coming out of Seattle on a regular basis very soon!

The photo above was taken while I was walking over a bridge in Venice, Italy where I had paused to take a picture and noticed that there were padlocks attached to many spots on the bridge and that each one had writing on it. I was told that this is a sort of urban legend, the ideas being that a couple would affix a padlock with a message, their names or even just their initials on it and then throw away the key thus locking their love forever.

Once I noticed the padlocks, suddenly it seemed as if they were everywhere and particularly popular in Italy. I can only imagine how many have to be cut off on a continual basis. While this can be seen as an unfortunate act of grafitti on a beautiful historic bridge, it’s interesting to think about the desire to make one’s mark on a place they’ve been or leave something behind as if leaving a piece of themselves in that time and space to live on forever. Forever together in this case. And our craving as humans for the romantic.

This somewhat recent craze seems to have exploded in Italy in particular, due in part to a novel written in 1992 by Federico Moccia titled Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo, translated as Three Metres Above the Sky and gave way to the English film, “Three Steps Over Heaven”. Another novel followed in 2006 titled Ho Voglia di Te or I Desire You. The romantic rite mentioned in the books say that young lovers will spend their lived together forever if they place a padlock with their names on the third lamp post from the Corso Francia end of the Ponte Milvio in Rome and then throw the key into the Tiber River. This tradition has taken hold of many cities in Italy including Florence, Venice, Naples, Lecce and others. The craze has gotten so out of control that fines are being given out in some cities and in the case of the Ponte Milvio, while there is no fine yet, a website has been set up for people to leave a virtual padlock and even throw their key into the Tiber.

This craze stems beyond Italy however and seems the origin actually lies in the Hungarian city of Pécs where a fence, not a bridge, was the object of the padlock fixation dating back some thirty years.

But the locks of love don’t stop there, they spread out throughout Europe and beyond. A few more photos below, like a fence in Riga, Latvia, another in Cologne, Germany and even Zhangjiajie, China. It’s interesting how our love for the romantic spans generations and cultures.

images via Lisa Town, PioPio, adriennf, Khriszianfabry

Tara Donovan, installation artist out of Brooklyn, New York, creates pieces made out of everyday ordinary objects like drinking straws, cups, fishing wire and paper. These simple objects when are then transformed into amazing textural and topographical works of art. The individual object then is almost no longer recognizable in it’s original form but has taken on a new life form. The installation in the image above feels like some sort of life form bubbling out of the ceiling, reflecting light in different ways throughout the form. But the piece is made simply with a sea of styrofoam cups and hot glue. A detail shot is below.

Below are images of an untitled piece from 2003 that uses paper plates held together by hot glue to form highly texture spheres the look almost soft and fuzzy from a distance.

“Haze” was made in 2005 from stacking an amazing amount of clear drinking straw to create a sensual wall that bubbles up in places that gives it an almost liquid look.

The following piece uses ripped up tarpaper that has been stacked into an undulating landform titled “Transplanted”. It was firt exhibited outdoors in the IBM Exhibition Space on 57th and Madison Ave. in New York City in the fall of 2003. Following it’s time in the outdoors, it was moved into the Ace Gallery indoor exhibition space.

images via Ace Gallery