Home & Garden

Toronto based street artist Posterchild has produced series of artworks that continues his Mario Blocks theme. Combining vintage video game iconography with guerrilla gardening, he’s created a batch of flower planters that look like fire flower power up blocks from the Super Mario Bothers video game. Nice way to inject a dose of fun and beauty into plain city streets.

Kudzu is an extremely fast growing plant, usually considered a weed that can grow up two two inches a day. A native plant of China, it was first introduced to the USA in 1876. It was planted extensively in the southern United States to prevent soil erosion. Fast forward to today, and Kudzu is everywhere in the South, growing out of control and messing up the local ecosystems.

The good news is that the Kudzu plant is a great raw material to make ethanol. The roots are the size of sweet potatoes and contain all the right elements to produce the (currently) corn crop hogging fuel.

[via ESPN]

LAist points us to a commendable urban redevelopment project now underway in Hollywood. The intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gordon Street is home to a drab parking lot and an unused half acre grassy field. A coalition of neighborhood residents have come together to reclaim this wasted detritus and transform it into a park. They want to breathe life back to the area and create a vital hub for the community to gather. Drivers have not been forgotten either. The existing parking lot is to be relocated underground, and the park will sit on top.

[via LAist]

As a visual icon and meme, cassette tapes are popping up all over the place right now. I’ve even witnessed a good number of people rocking out with little tape decks. What’s the appeal -analog nostalgia? They did rule as a media format for almost 30 years. Perhaps it’s the physicality in an age of digitization. Of course, they are cheaper and more durable than an ipod.

Riding this wave of cassette love, Transparent House has come up with a novel way of reusing all these old plastic boxes. They’ve created a batch of beautiful lamps constructed almost entirely out of cassettes. The lamps use a cool-burning neon light source to keep the plastic tapes from melting and casts interesting shadows on the wall. A micro cassette version is also available.

[via Technabob]

MIT’s Sheila Kennedy is changing the way we think about solar energy, designing panels that are flexible and mobile, like common household curtains. Moving away from the static, flat panels that we’re used to seeing, Kennedy’s “Soft House” (which she exhibited recently at the Vitra Design Museum in Essen, Germany) features energy-harvesting curtains that move in the direction of sunlight, generating more than half the daily power needs of an average American household (up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity). Kennedy’s prototype reflects an innovative, sustainable approach to home design: “Surfaces that define space can also be producers of energy,” says Kennedy. “The boundaries between traditional walls and utilities are shifting.”

[via MIT News]

A man in Australia is trying to make a clean break from his past by auctioning off everything he owns in Perth plus an introduction to his friends and a trial at his job. Listed on the site alife4sale.com, the contents of Ian Usher’s life that’s available to the lucky winning bidder include:

LIFESTYLE
Perth, Western Australia
Hobbies

HOUSE VEHICLES
Car
Motorbike
Jet Ski
Bicycle

OTHER GOOD STUFF
The Spa
Home Entertainment System
TV, DVD Players, DVDs and CDs Computer Equipment Cameras Sofa and Rug BBQ, Outdoor Setting, Hammock and Outdoor Equipment

HOUSE

CONTENTS

FRIENDS

JOB

The job is at Jenny Jones Rugs. Bidding has reached AUS$ 300,000.

alife4sale on eBay

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.

Architect Sheila Kennedy has designed a home capable of generating 16,000 solar watt hours of electricity with light-sensitive curtains. While the technology is currently too expensive for immediate use, it gives us an idea of how a home could be designed using power-generating curtains that define space as well as sustainability.

[via inhabitat]

In the NYT Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner questions whether eating foods grown locally is really all that green. In fact, he maintains the reverse: that growing food yourself may create a larger carbon footprint than dialing up Fresh Direct.

Really? This seems contrary to common sense. The whole benefit of the Locavore “movement” (consuming local foods or even growing them yourself) is to cut down on the environmental cost of shipping a mango in December. It should also be tastier and better for you (no pesticides and preservatives!) as well as cheaper (no overhead or markups!) But Dubner systematically shoots down each one of those arguments:

1) While “deliciousness” is subjective, no one person can grow or produce all the things she would like to eat.

2) There’s a lot to be said for the nutritional value of home-grown food. But again, since one person can grow only so much variety, there are bound to be big nutritional gaps in her diet that will need to be filled in.

3) Is it cheaper to grow your own food?… Let’s say you decide to plant a big vegetable garden this year to save money. Now factor in everything you need to buy to make it happen — the seeds, fertilizer, sprout cups, twine, tools, etc. — along with the transportation costs and the opportunity cost. Are you sure you really saved money by growing your own zucchini and corn? And what if 1,000 of your neighbors did the same?

4) Keeping in mind the transportation inefficiencies mentioned above, consider the “food miles” argument: We find that although food is transported long distances in general…the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”

In fact, the “specialization” method of food production and distribution is “ruthlessly efficient,” he says. It means less transportation, lower prices and more variety. If you want to save money on tasty food, wait for restaurant week.

[via Freakonomics]