It seemed not long ago that Japanese architect Shigeru Ban first shocked the industry with his temporary pavilions made from paper tubes. These days, Ban lands multimillion-dollar commissions to erect paper-tube constructions around the world, and the unequivocally built-to-not-last design ethos has been inducted into popular contemporary practice. The Parisian design firm Studio Andrew Todd, for instance, was recently selected to realize their proposal for a circular theater made almost entirely of recycled-paper bales. More after the break.

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Architects love finding new uses for old materials. With the design world becoming ever more eco-conscious, repurposing discarded pieces from architectural and infrastructural projects helps architects create some pretty imaginative buildings without having to deplete precious natural resources. Recycling used parts in new projects is often welcomed enthusiastically by the public—just take a look the the TuboHotel, one of Architizer’s most viewed projects.

In the Prahan district of Melbourne, Techne Architects took a little inspiration from the popularity of repurposing. Attached to the Prahran Hotel, a two-story corner pub with a streamlined Art Deco façade, is a new addition made out of concrete sewer pipes. Completed in May, the new extension dramatically increases the pub’s capacity, while acting as an eye-catching sculpture that suggests stacked kegs or barrels to passersby. Click through to read more!

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We are in no way strangers to innovation, at least in terms of architecture and design. We’ve seen it all: styrofoam, inflatables, even Jell-O. But there’s always room for new discoveries, including recycled dairy cartons. Built using 45,000 cartons recycled by more than 100 colleges from around Granada, Spain, the Tetrabrik Pavilion (or Hall of Briks) was a temporary exhibition space designed in 2011 by CUAC Arquitectura and Sugarplatform to celebrate World Recycling Day. Also: The pavilion has set a Guinness World Record as the largest built structure created from recycled materials. Not too shabby for a few thousand used milk cartons! Read more.

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Now that the Olympics have ended, the future use for the sports venues is on many a Londoner’s mind. While organizers have taken great care to lay plans in place to rehabilitate 6 of the 8 permanent venues, the future of the main Olympic stadium. That may not yet be determined, but Olympic sponsor Dow Chemical is already ensuring the recycling of the 306 fabric panels that adorn the outside of the stadium.

The main stadium was designed to be partly dismantled after its 15 minutes of fame, reducing the original capacity of 80,000 down to a mere 25,000 seats. Dow Chemical, who provided both the materials and the manpower to complete the stadium wrap, is now donating the majority of the fabric panels to be re-used for youth projects in Britain, with the remaining panels to be recycled into new construction materials by Axion Recycling.

In addition to the aforementioned reuse, approximately 20 of the fabric panels (each 25 meters high and 2.5 meters wide) will be donated to the charity Article 25.

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Last summer saw the completion of the 747 House, a villa for the jet age in every sense. With a floating curved roof comprised of a pair of recycled airplane wings, the house has all of the angular geometries and sweeping, gestural forms characteristic of the Californian expressionism found in Googie architecture of mid-century America, but without any of the crassness that came to color the movement. The architects were able to achieve a coherent aesthetic and model that fully incorporates the recycled materials, allowing them to inform the entire design at every step, from conception on through detailing. Following that example, 2012Architecten have designed a playground using only discarded wind turbine blades. Sounds dangerous…and awesome. Continue.

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Yesterday, Material ConneXion launched its Print/3D show to great fanfare. With wine glasses in hand, visitors marveled at lamp fixtures, bike chains, and furniture, all printed in whole with the patented intricacies of their cutting edge process of production. It wasn’t difficult, however, to pry away from the lively Makerbot to peruse Material ConneXion’s immense library of materials, its claim to fame for fifteen years now.

As we grazed our fingers against panel after panel of textured material samples, we were reminded of the often-overlooked significance of material in architecture and design, and just how much can hinge upon the substance that fills a designer’s forms or frames his or her spaces. This is perhaps why we were intrigued by J+J/Invision’s new line of carpets, a collection aptly called Paradigm Shift.

As leaders in the commercial carpet industry, J+J/Invision have leveraged their clout in the interiors market to produce a collection that interweaves their refined aesthetic with a pioneering call for more sustainable manufacturing practices. For their new collection, J+J/Invision designers have repurposed their stores of excess yarn to create a brand new line defined by shifting colors and modular patterns. ‘Evolve’ and ‘Emerge’ intertwine background neutrals with vibrant colors to create a subtle yet dynamic sense of movement. Thus, despite their modular appearance, the two styles manage to recall the handicraft aesthetic of traditional knitted fabrics and vintage quilts. Furthermore, no two tiles of carpet are the same. Paradigm Shift is thus, as its name suggests, a commendable shift towards rethinking environmentally responsible design. To learn more, take a look at J+J/Invision’s brand page.

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Gleaning over the films of Alfred Hitchcock would reveal a number of the director’s paranoiac ticks, among which is his notorious penchant for cleanliness and orderliness, particular in those cases and spaces which have been sullied by the likes of disreputable detectives, unscrupulous lawmakers, and deranged motel keepers. In Hitchcock’s films, these spaces are always methodically cleansed following the transgression and fully restored to their original, pristine conditions. The same can be said for much contemporary design (see Apple), which espouses the virtues of minimalism while generally neglecting the material conditions of the space the product or architecture is meant to inhabit. Life processes are resisted, even subjugated by the tyrannically clean rooms and furniture in a constant struggle to return to the design’s prior antiseptic state of equilibrium.

Reddish Studio‘s Bath & Beyond chair cleverly subverts this scenario, re-purposing a used bathtub to create a chair that can be described as both literally and figuratively “clean” design. The designers call it a “readymade chair”, alluding, of course, to Duchamp’s infamous scatological pun. A disused aluminum bathtub was sawed in half and flipped upside down on two spindly legs. The tub’s bottom basin (where the plunge and faucet hole are located) provides an ergonomically sound seat which the chair’s makers insist is comfortable. Armrests were formed by bending thin metal flaps and bolting them to the sides of the seat. Bath & Beyond is just one of Reddish Studio’s many “clear and intriguing” projects that, through their resourceful and inventive constructions, seek to help objects “feel better about themselves.”

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As if the Dekalb Market, an assembly of shipping containers recycled into delectable boutique stores, were not impressive enough, artist Mac Premo has brought a new example of adaptive reuse to downtown Brooklyn: the Dumpster Project converts the interior of a dumpster into a walk-in traveling exhibition space. Forced to downsize into a smaller studio and discard many of his belongings, Premo decided not to throw his possessions away, keeping them instead in a dumpster adapted into a traveling exhibition space. Read more.

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