From the category archives:
Mind Over Matter
Grace Jeffers' love affair with materials began at nine years old, when the other students used paper doilies to decorate their Valentine’s Day project, she shingled hers in laminate.
You pick up a highlighter to make some notes… Throw on a high visibility jacket for an evening run… Mark a page with a bright Post-It... See an orange caution cone on the highway. All these common objects are fluorescent. But have you ever stopped to think about what makes something fluoresce
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A new exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) highlights the most cutting-edge conceptual and technical trends in woodworking today.
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What will be the future of light? It is likely that we will seek solutions that will move away from the use of electricity and utilize a more sustainable form of power instead
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What material changes how we see every single other material around us? Light. You may not automatically consider light a material in the traditional sense, but it is critical to how we perceive our world.
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Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects, is the first exhibition in the world devoted to the Chicago-based group, and it explores a sense of how buildings and projects are created, what issues they resolve, and how solutions are shaped.
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You may have seen Elisa Strozyk’s wooden textiles already—they seem to be pinned everywhere on Pinterest these days! Not only are they cool to look at, with their geometric drape, but they are interesting in the way they make us look at two very common materials in a whole new light.
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Imagination knows no bounds. The adage was never more true than in the story of Caine Monroy and his Cardboard Arcade. It all started when LA resident Nirvan Mullick needed a new door handle for his car. He walked into his local auto parts store, only to find that the store owner’s son, nine-year-old Caine, in the most entrepreneurial of moves, had created an arcade by the front desk constructed completely of recycled cardboard and repurposed household objects.
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This is where I beg you to proceed cautiously with your decision to specify teak. Today as much as one-third of the annual harvest of teak comes from the native forests of Burma. If you have heard of “Thai teak” it is actually Burmese teak that was logged by Thai loggers and hauled across the border.
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My grandmother used to say “Money was invented round because it is supposed to roll.” Later in life I realized that clock faces are mostly round and thought perhaps that theory applies to time as well.
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Many people in the Northeastern U.S. could have used an “eternal flame” in the past couple weeks—a light that will burn bright despite power outages, superstorms, nor’easters and blizzards—a true hurricane lamp. Even better if that dream lamp is not only a serviceable object, but well-designed, technologically modern and environmentally conscious too. The Alessilux line of portable, rechargeable LED lamps meet the criteria.
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