PSFK Author:
Dave Pinter

Opening tomorrow (July 4th) on Montague Place behind the British Museum in London is a new temporary cultural space designed by Carmody Groarke Architects. Called the Sky Walk, the installation is the centerpiece of the Bloomsbury Hub of the London Festival of Architecture. Sky Walk is a series of elevated ramps that take visitors on a meandering journey exposing them to new views of the architectural details on the surrounding historic buildings. Over the next three days, Sky Walk will serve as a backdrop for performances, and exhibition, and a continuous picnic of locally produced food.

Sky Walk was constructed over the past three days out of reusable staging components. It’s covered in a translucent black mesh. The ramp reaches a height of over 13 feet at it’s tallest point.

The event is the first step in the total transformation of the street into a usable public space and a destination in its own right. The design firm of Burns+Nice have already developed proposals to redo the street and surrounding areas.

[via WAN]

Yesterday we spotlighted TerraCycle’s products that make use of reused packaging. Today we’ve spotted another interesting upcycling idea from London-based designer Shiu Yuk Yuen (site is Safari unfriendly). She’s proposed the UNbrella which is a compact umbrella that can be used for short distance trips through the rain. It consists of a handle and expanding pole and ribs which you then add newspaper, cardboard, or a plastic bag over the top of. There’s a thumb screw at the top to secure it all together. Carrying around a heavy umbrella can be a pain and this concept is a nice alternative for times when you get caught out in the rain.

[via Yanko Design]

TerraCycle made a name for themselves producing a line of plant fertilizer products that were organically made by worms and sold in recycled soda bottles. Not content to watch lots of other potentially reusable materials head to the landfill, the company is expanding operations to produce a line of cleaning products, supplies for school and the office, and yes even fashion accessories. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company has inked deals with a number of companies to collect some of their packaging waste and ‘upcycle’ it into new products. The company is already offering these products for sale at Target and hopes to be shipping to Walmart and Home Depot soon.

TerraCycle is committed to getting consumers involved. They have setup a nationwide collection network to source recyclables. Anyone can sign up via the website to collect a specific type of packaging. TerraCycle handles all the costs of transport back to their production facility. For every item sent, a donation is made to the charity of your choice.

To complete the circle, some companies like Kraft are already starting to put the TerraCycle logo on it’s packaging as a way to build awareness and encourage consumers to upcycle. For its part, TerraCycle looks to expand the product offer even more. Potentially on the horizon are shower curtains, umbrellas, lunch boxes, and backpacks.

Frequent readers of PSFK will note we’ve been keeping an eye on inspired school designs that aim to create innovative places for learning. The recent renovation of the Fuji Kindergarten in the Tokyo suburb of Tachikawa definitely got our attention. The project is the result of work by Tezuka Architects and a collaboration with designer Kashiwa Sato (who contributed to the design of the New York Uniqlo store) to expand the building but retain the schools unique spirit. Fuji is known for it’s Montessori teaching methods and open-minded policy that all children are welcome no matter what economic background their families have.

The architects resulting design is a circular building with a large interior courtyard. The building’s roof is a wooden deck that the children can use as a play space. The site contained several existing trees which the architects left and built the structure around. There’s rope ladders on the trees that the kids can use to climb on. The most striking (and controversial) part of the interior of the building is there are no solid walls. Even the bathrooms are as barrier free as possible. The intention was to create as open a space as possible and to reduce the confining barrier of walls in regards to learning. Even signs with school rules were kept to a minimum to emphasize personal responsibility in the young students.

Adjacent to the school is a farming area where the children grow vegetables and keep rabbits and goats. The school intends to plant grass in the courtyard for the goats to graze on and use the milk to make cheese for the children.

540 students attend the school and there is a huge waiting list to enter. The staff intends to expand the enrollment to 650 soon which will make Fuji the largest kindergarten in Japan in a single building.

More photos here.

[via Archinect]

Qatar Steel Corp. recently commissioned futurist and designer Syd Mead to produce a vision of what the company’s home city of Doha might look like sometime in the future. Mead produced the above painting depicting a city with huge towering sculptural skyscrapers. He also proposes whale shaped airships gliding around the city. A series of five inverted cones topped with parks and even small lakes make up one of the more interesting pieces of architecture proposed.

Mead has made a career out of projecting the future on to paper. Nearly five decades ago he produced a groundbreaking series of books for US Steel which offered a glimpse of transportation and the urban landscape in the future. Mead has also worked on the production design of many films including Blade Runner, Aliens, Tron, and 2010. His latest newsletter includes an interview with filmmaker Ridley Scott who reveals he’s looking to possibly work with Mead on his next sci-fi film.

If you had to describe the interior of a pizza restaurant you’d probably note some fake brick, maybe a lot of white tile, some fake plants, and poster or two of some iconic landmark in Italy. Architect Francesco Moncada envisioned something completely different for Pizza Perez located in Syracuse, Italy.

The project brief contained all the usual suspects, a low budget, not a lot of floor space, and the need to have a separate dining and pick up area. Moncada started with the desire to make the dining experience more social and stay away from booth seating that creates closed groups. To achieve this, a chair and table module was selected with a minimum size volume. These modules were then placed close together to encourage interaction between customers.

The team then tackled the interior design. Due to the tight budget, a simple collection of materials were selected that are more common to construction sites. A central dividing wall clad in translucent fiberglass paneling creates separation between the dining area and the take out counter. Within the wall, shelving has been provided to customers for their bags and coats. The flooring and back kitchen wall are clad in common marine grade plywood.

Graphic design firm Point Supreme was brought in to create the environmental graphics in the space. They devised two large wall graphics located on either side of the restaurant. On the dining side, a large diagram was created which graphically depicts all the possible pizza ingredient combinations available. The idea was to celebrate the variety and choice available. Its part scientific diagram part pop art piece. Over on the pickup side is a full size image of a zebra. It is colorless, simple in its appearance and it refuses to suggest an explanation. It is simply standing there beautiful, mysterious, surreal and intending to inspire thoughts and discussions between customers waiting for a table or a take out order.

[ via Dezeen]

Prior to the launch of the new Brooklyn location of Ikea, the retailer is dropping popup apartments at various locations around the city. Today, PSFK stopped by the one setup in Union Square. On hand were lots of Ikea associates talking about the opening and handing out grand opening sale flyer’s. If you can’t make it to Union Square today, the apartment will move to the Brooklyn Public Library on June 13 and Cadman Plaza on June 15.

Ikea Brooklyn will open in Red Hook at 9am on June 18th. More coverage here at Racked.

What if instead of downloading music into your iPod, it could just compose a new piece of music for you. What if it sensed the time of day, season, location you were at, and activity you were doing and based the composition around those criteria?

It’s not so far off from happening. Create Digital Music recently speculated about the coming application of generative music in mobile devices. There are already a host of music composition applications and interfaces merging on the iPhone. Others like the soon to launch Mixtikl from Intermorphic will allow composition, performance, and remixing capabilities right from a mobile.

The next step is blending these applications with generative music tools and a loop library to allow the device to make it’s own music. Artists like Brian Eno have experimented with generative compositions before but have been limited by technology. Eno released an album called Generative Music 1 back in 1996 using early Koan software. Contrary to traditional music making, generative music is all about creatively setting up the parameters to allow for interesting results.

If generative music takes off, it might be sometime in the future that we all question how silly it was to classify music in things called genres.

Create Digital Music

Adobe quietly launched Acrobat.com earlier this week which the company hopes will change the way the world works together on documents, for the better. Acrobat.com is obviously Adobe’s answer to Google Docs.

The suite is starting with three applications:

Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.

The first thing you’ll notice about each of the apps is they look really sleek. It’s also clear that Adobe looking to further expand ways the pdf file format can be used with Acrobat.com. Pdf’s can be created and distributed from within a browser window just by dragging in files.

Erik Larson of Adobe says the aim is to provide free document collaboration services for individuals that will meet the needs of most people. These services will remain free even when we come out of our beta phase. Over time we will provide businesses with premium subscription services such as workgroup capabilities, administrative controls, more advanced document workflows and additional capacity. But in the meantime, we’re confident that our free services will provide great value to millions of users.

Acrobat.com is officially in beta which means you may see some odd things happen here and there.