Costa Rica’s motto may be “pura vida” (pure life), but the country has a big trash problem. More than 60% of the 2400 tons of garbage produced daily in this tourism hot spot ends up in unregulated, open junkyards; less than 10% is recycled. Even worse, 250 tons are dumped into Costa Rica’s beautiful rivers and tropical forests every day. That’s why a group of architecture students from New York Institute of Technology has begun building a recycling and education center in the Costa Rican town of Nosara. Now, the students, led by NYIT professor Tobias Holler, of HOLLER Architecture, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough funds to complete the center, and document the process. Read more!

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Images: courtesy WHIM architects

WHIM Architects is looking to create a modern-day Robinson Crusoe with the fantastic Recycled Island. The plan, which is hoping to raise $70,000 in funding via Kickstarter, is to build a self-sustaining island that floats on top of repurposed plastic. This trash, which litters coastlines from Senegal and Mumbai all the way to Brazil, endangers wildlife and human health, but WHIM plans to transform the waste into building structures and compost that will allow a home to float along the waves of the ocean and sustain itself off the grid. It’s so awesome that we’ve included it in Architizer’s own Kickstarter page, which highlights some of our favorite projects. Read more and watch a video!

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image © Fernandes Arquitetos Associados

Soccer fans can soon have their Coca-Cola and drink it too. The soda giant has launched a sustainability effort in conjunction with the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil that encourages consumers to recycle their plastic bottles. Each bottle collected at one of the almost 100 special recycling spots set up in Rio will be integrated into the lining of 6,773 seats in the new Maracana Stadium designed by Fernandes Arquitetos Associados. The stadium will host the final FIFA World Cup match and celebrate the enormous recycling effort of Brazil’s biggest soccer fans. After all, the seats couldn’t be made without them. Check out Coca-Cola’s video here.

[via psfk]

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The cardboard box is an iconic element of the urban visual vocabulary, and inherent within its symbolic lexicon is its enabling of nomadism; it is most often found as a container for moving objects, whether from an old home to a new one or from truck to store, though it is also an important visual stand-in for true urban nomadism as the shelter of choice for the rootless and homeless.

In his installation entitled “Boombox,” French designer Stéphane Malka sought to contrast the instability and transience inherent in cardboard boxes with the solidity and permanence of urban stone blocks, the major component of old buildings in Barcelona, the site of the installation. He coats architectural surfaces with hundreds of these quotidian boxes, which then take on the aspect of some sort of crystal growing from rock, or lichen on bark. Thus, the part of the city which is constantly in flux invades and converts the built form into something which can also move and change. Continue.

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Images: Monocomplex via DesignalmiC

Cardboard is one of the most ubiquitous materials on the planet, thanks to its ease of manufacture and relative cheapness, as well as its ability to be adapted to almost any use. Since cardboard can be recycled, many have claimed that it is one of the more sustainable materials (the claim is a bit suspect, but that’s for another post). This has led to cardboard’s growing popularity as a building material; one only need look at some of Shigeru Ban’s ‘cardboard architecture’ (here, here, or here) to understand its potential as a structural replacement for many other, more massive, sheet goods. Now, furniture designers have begun to experiment with other applications for the material.

The (kinda) new applications we are most drawn to, however, are the ones in which the cardboard has been aggregated to create mass. The effect will be familiar to anyone who has built one of those unimaginative (and strangely expensive) architectural site models: the curving forms and gradual change created by layering.

Seoul-based design studio Monocomplex recently rolled out their “Reborn Cardboard Sofa,” a chair (or loveseat?) made completely from post-consumer, dump-destined cardboard sheets. The chair was built in a subtractive fashion. First, the cardboard sheets were stacked and bound with adhesives into a large cube. Then, the designers cut away excess material with a saw and grinder, stopping periodically to gauge the correctness of the lumpen mass’s ergonomics.

The result is a beautiful, yet brutal, piece, in which the traces of the chair’s violent birth are exhibited in plain sight. This product was not made for general consumption, however. The makers of “Reborn” claim that it is a sculpture, rather than industrial design project, so you won’t be seeing these for sale anytime soon. Don’t fret, if you have the proper tools and know-how, you can make one for yourself!

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Photo: flickr user su–may

UK department store Marks & Spencer (M&S) is starting a “fashion revolution” that goes by the name “schwopping” (shopping + swapping), a kind of rewards program meant to encourage recycling and to frame questions about the ethics and scope of garbage. To illustrate the abundance of material waste that prompted the marketing ploy “ethically-informed”, “ecologically-minded” campaign, the company installed some 10,000 pieces of discarded clothing–the number of garments, M & S claims, that is trashed every 5 minutes in the UK alone–on the facade of an abandoned brewery warehouse in East London. The piece is a visual compendium of secondhands, with near every industry color, form, and graphic, not too mention decade, represented.

Cooperating with Oxfam, the company aims to “change shopping forever” by getting customers to turn in their old clothes that will be recycled and distributed to the impoverished. Over 1,200 so-called “scwhwop drops” have been placed in several M&S locations to collect used garments from customers, who, upon selflessly donating their disused tees and jeans, will receive  a £5 voucher for future purchases. Charity pays, kids!

Photo: flickr user world of good

Photo: flickr user terekhova

[via MyModernMet]

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Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception may have left many with stitched brows and confused looks, but entangled meta-reveries aside, few could forget the scenes of Paris dissolving, rebuilding, and folding in on itself. French architect Stephane Malka has imagined a similar vision of architectural flux, but one brought to life through the pragmatic re-appropriation of wooden shipping pallets. More after the break.

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Earlier this month, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli gave her poetic two cents on the state of ‘green’ design, comparing environmentally responsible design to dark chocolate, both of which should be “delicious and sensual, yet still good for the health of body and soul.” Her most basic guideline for a more sustainable future was to create objects that either last long and can be repaired, or objects that can be innovatively recycled.

While designers have aspired to make long-lasting objects for some time now, the prospect of innovative recycling is still considerably novel, churning out a series of things-that-look-like-other-things, such as homes made out of recycled airplane parts or tables made from discarded toys artfully welded into a standing leg. But we were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that this pristine, floating geodesic dome by SLO architecture and a team of Bronx teens and architecture interns was constructed entirely from discarded, storm-snapped umbrellas and plastic soda bottles. Read on.

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India’s climate fluctuates between intense heat and aridity to monsoonal rains, a disparity of environmental conditions that is particularly harsh and sometimes crippling. Using new solar technologies, however, it is possible to harvest these once malevolent forces for productive ends. The “Mango” streetlamp concept by designer Adam Mikloski does just that, gathering and transferring both rain and sunlight into electricity.

The streetlight takes its form from the mango leaf, whose profile Mikloski stylized into a working diagrammatic figure. The top surface area of the leaf is broad and flat enough to install solar cells, while the tapered lower half proves well-suited to drinking in rainwater, which will be funneled into a water tank and recycled by an inbuilt turbine. The collected sunlight and water will power the LED lights on the underside of the leaf faces–a much more efficient solution to traditional street lighting models, which emit harmful vapors and consume a signifcant amount of energy. The Mango design was chosen as one of ten finalists in the India Future of Change Design Competition, which seeks to promote and foster a national creative industry to match the country’s increasing global might. India has, of course, realized the imperative to develop sustainable technologies which will not only revamp old industries and develop entirely new ones, but also quicken the pace of modernization throughout the subcontinent.

[via EcoFriend]

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For all LEGO’s new licensed-toys and innovating marketing ploys, the experience of playing with the miniature bricks has changed little since they were first introduced over 60 years ago. Whether you’re constructing a city, assembling the Farnsworth House, re-creating Quidditch matches, or just playing like Bjarke Ingels or Norman Foster, the building can all be reduced to that initial stack-and-lock action. The satisfying snap of stacking one block on top of the other is enough to send anyone down the timestream back to their childhood. Yet all things must change, even if only slightly.

So is the case with Earth Blocks, the world’s first biodegradable LEGOs. The classic proportions are left intact. Their shape remains uniform, just like before. You can still stack and arrange them into any orthogonal composition you can dream up. The only thing that’s changed is what goes into the making of these little guys. A composite of cedar tree bark, compressed dust from sawn cedar logs, coffee beens, and green-tea leaves is mixed with polypropylene to attain the rigidity necessary to withstand all manner of building. Granted, Earth Blocks are less pointed around the tops and edges, dampening the “snap” when combining two pieces, and it’s true that no one will confuse the splotched, green-and-brown hued blocks for their multi-colored predecessors. They also give off a slight fragrance, which is reportedly more acute in the green-tea version that will be available soon.

Can Earth Blocks and other similar products help introduce and orient young children to the virtues of recycling and sustainability, molding them into pro-active participants in responding to present and future ecological crises? Did I just read that on the back of the box? Buy your set at the Guggenheim Museum store!

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