A new trend is emerging throughout the Mediterranean and we kinda like it: a growing number of food artists and restauranteurs are bringing street food indoors. There’s a new joint in Cairo that serves Egyptian classics in a fresh, contemporary setting and now there is Souk – a vibrant space in Athens, Greece that serves […]
Select pieces of recycled, eco friendly furniture will be sold at an auction house in central Israel next week alongside paintings and other fine art. Sustainable furniture design has been creeping into the Israeli art world over the past few years, with eco friendly furniture being exhibited at Jerusalem’s Design Week recently and other recycled […]
Paper pulp furniture is stronger than it looks. Bamboo has been praised for several years as the most sustainable material for furniture (due to its quickly renewable nature), with cardboard coming a close second due to its recycled and recyclable form. At first thought cardboard may not sound very strong, but when you think about […]
Jerusalem’s second annual Design Week will generate awareness of climate change through design and show off some local sustainable designers. Jerusalem will host the grand opening of its second annual Design Week on December 4th, with a week of design exhibitions, conferences, master classes, cinema events and workshops planned for a variety of audiences. The […]
Made from sawdust and plastic bags alone, these adhesive-free lamps take leftover materials and make them shine again. Plastic bags are an (unfortunately) abundant material that have been used in many ways by designers, but sawdust – though abundant as well – has not been used as frequently by sustainable Middle Eastern designers. One other […]
When this mannequin free falls, low-carbon-footprint chairs with “human” form are made. Israeli designer Ezri Tarazi, the head of the Industrial Design Department at Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, is no stranger to sustainable design. Some of his previous projects include eye glass frames made from wood, and home furnishings created from upcycled […]
Ron Arad’s bike is up for the auction block: These wheels will add some spring to your ride. Unlike the car, which comes in many shapes, colors, and sizes, the bicycle has not been subject to as many design transformations and over the years has pretty much retained its classic shape. Here and there there […]
Inspired by last year’s Sukkah City in NYC (see one of the past designs above), St. Louis is hosting its own sukkah design competition this year. With the Jewish high holidays fast approaching, some of us are thinking about honey recipes, sustainable festive meals, and sukkahs (or temporarily erected shelters). The folks over at Washington […]
If you think these sunglasses are made from tortoise shell, guess again. Accessories may be one of the most important places for an ecologically minded designer to start. Accessories are the victims of quickly changing trends and fads, and so their unsustainable fashionable-ness makes their ecological sustainability greatly needed. We’ve seen other green designers tackle […]
Designers often talk about “clean” design, with crisp lines and an absence of frou-frou decoration. See the emergence of functional design in restaurant furniture. But apparently there’s another kind of clean design – the kind that’s clean because it’s upcycled from objects formerly used to keep people clean, like a bathtub. The Bath & Beyond […]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iRB8amlw0[/youtube] The seven modular folds of the Loop Chair grant it a twelve-fold function. Modular: constructed with standardized units or dimensions for flexibility and variety in use. It’s the “flexibility and variety in use” part that makes modular design so sustainable, because if one item can be modified and serve a range of functions then […]
Hanging from the ceiling like an ivy plant, Omer Deutsch’s “Secondary Growth” computer design softens the harsh, plastic, traditional work cubicle. If you’re reading this right now, chances are you are a person who spends at least an hour or two a day on a computer (if not more). This has become commonplace practice for […]
Exhibition in Israel brings together sustainable “contemporary cavemen” (and designers). Post Fossil, a current exhibition at the Design Museum in Holon, Israel, asks the question: how to create in a post-fossil-fueled world? As the exhibition description states, “Time has come for extreme change. Society is ready to break away from last century for good. To […]
Mr. Sawaya makes no claims about changing the world, though his design could use a touch of green blush. Born and raised in Lebanon, the Italian designer William Sawaya once admitted to admiring the famous Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Known for defying all reason and physics, Ms. Hadid’s architecture trumps convention with boundless (and genius) […]