Urban Recycling for the Locarno Film Festival

A new way to think architecture in our social and economic crisis times comes from AZPA (Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture). The London-Barcelona based practice has been announced as winner of an international competition aimed to establish a recognisable home for the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland. Breaking away from the starchitect notion of public architecture needing to make an “extravagant gesture”, AZPA’s innovative proposal partakes in an act of “urban recycling and sustainability performance” by reusing the pre-existent complex of the Palazzo Scolastico and the Piazza Remo Rossi. Both represents a great opportunity to encrust the Film Festival within an urban structure which has already deep affective relations...

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What can be Made from Recycled Cargo Straps? Bundubags!

Bundubags makes innovative, totally recycled bags with a core belief that lives can be changed by good design. Bundubags began with a creative idea, a love of contemporary African design and a desire to support African women. Handwoven using traditional African weaving techniques, each bag is made from recycled cargo strapping made from PET, which is spun into long strips. One of the beach bags for examples, uses the equivalent of 6 to 8 pieces of 1.5L PET bottle , so more PET recycled bags means less waste in our daily life . They also collect offcuts, unused strapping bales as well as used strips, that they sort and clean and re-use in the production of each bag. So it is twice recycled! The project is based in the Alexandra...

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Temporary Fire Shelter in Copenaghen, by Shjworks

The project Fire Shelter by Danish firm Shjworks consist of a built structure, located in Sydhavnstippen - Copenhagen, and an open letter. "The starting point for the design emerged from a fascination of the place. It´s a temporary project and a design experiment that wish to celebrate the place. The project has public access, and it establishes experiences of spatial and social character. In the creation of it nobody has been asked of advice, neither has it been possible for anyone to tell his or her opinion. It is simply thought of as a gift." Sydhavnstippen is an amazing place by a 20-minute bike ride from the city center. After the second world war it became landfilled with building materials, until 1973. Today it is a habitat...

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Tunnel of Love: the interaction between man and nature in Kevlan, Ukraine

A tunnel where nature and man-made infrastructure and blend together to create a unique spectacle. Many call it the "Tunnel of Love" - Тоннель любви in Ukrainian - and is located on the outskirts of a small town called Klevan, Ukraine, not far from the Ukrainian regional center Rivne. The tunnel, which is one of the main natural attractions of Ukraine, is born from the interaction between man and nature as the landscape has been shaped by the applicant passage of a train, with cargo for use in a steel factory, through the forest. During the warm months of the year thanks to pruning and the regular passage of trains through the track, Mother Nature makes peace with man by growing trees branches over the track to form a tunnel of...

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The Daily Talk describes a hopeful Liberia in the process of renewal

The Daily Talk is an English-language news medium published daily on a blackboard on Tubman Boulevard a main thoroughfare in the center of the Liberian capital Monrovia. It is "the most widely read report" in Monrovia, a city where radios and televisions are luxuries most people cannot afford, and so many Monrovians lack the access to the conventional mass media. The founder, managing editor and sole employee of the Daily Talk is Alfred J. Sirleaf, who founded his blackboard newspaper in 2000, in the middle of Liberia’s fourteen-year-long civil war, because of his belief that a well-informed citizenry is the key to the rebirth of Liberia after years of civil war. In post-war Liberia, Sirleaf sees access to information as the key...

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Wicker-Covered Car by Ojo Obaniyi, an ingenius way to advertise a business

A sustainable good idea of marketing comes from Ibadan the capital city of Oyo State and the third largest metropolitan area, by population, in Nigeria. Here there are a lot of raffia palm cane weavers, but one of them has managed to attract the global attention of the whole internet, after pictures of his unique advertisement-on-wheels were published by major news sites. Local artisan Ojo Obaniyi has applied his skill in weaving in an unusually creative and ingenius way to advertise his business, his raffia palm cane weaving services. Obaniyi, who has practiced the craft for 20 years, has covered the inside and outside of his Volkswagen pickup in the natural material including the entire car body, the wheel caps, chairs, steering...

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With Promised Land fracking arrives in Hollywood

The begining is 2010, when was realized the documentary Gasland. The movie portrayed the devastating effects of a method of drilling into shale gas formations called hydraulic fracturing colloquially known as "fracking", in rural american communities. It garnered mostly positive reviews from film critics and newspapers but also negative responses by fracking lobbyists. They answer with the production of a movie titled TruthLand, by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, concerned with listing false information propagated in Gasland and showing a different view on fracking. The new film Promised Land reflected a trend about fracking since the release of Gasland, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary....

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