Smart Design

Bees. The word alone makes me wince with haunting hallucinations of ominous buzzing and a world of hurt. But I’m reconsidering the pointy-butted buggers (while keeping my epi-pen close, of course) because they can be of extreme value to all flower and food gardens worth their dirt. Without bee pollination, our produce counters and farmer’s markets would be noticeably leaner, having left the birds, butterflies, and the wind to pick up all the slack. Bumble bees are some of nature’s most prolific pollinators and they promote flourishing flora wherever they reside, commonly in underground hives just below the soil’s surface.

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In our apartments or houses we’ve all got beds, couches, tables and chairs, and our choices of these is what gives our places their style. There are a myriad of designers producing thousands of varieties of furniture. But one item in our homes we probably never give much thought to is the doors we use to pass from room to room.

Perhaps in future years, designers and companies will realize that in neglecting doors, they’ve been squandering a prime opportunity to design a significant part of the home experience; after all, we pass through doors dozens of times a day.

One company that is paying attention to portals is Italian home furnishings company Albed. Their new line of Karim-Rashid designed doors are striking and unusual, to say the least–when I first saw the photos it wasn’t obvious to me that I was looking at doors at all. “Where the heck’s the knob?” I thought. read more

The upstairs neighbors in my second Brooklyn apartment were a nightmare: Up at all hours, liked to wear heavy shoes, and owned a dog that dragged his chain back and forth across the wooden plank floor. After finally moving out I resolved to only rent apartments that were on the top floor of whatever building I lived in. I succeeded–and soon found the problem with top-floor living: Anytime the building rooftop springs a leak (apparently a very common occurrence in New York’s older buildings), those leaks are directly experienced by us top-dwellers.

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You’ve probably heard of the “kitchen triangle,” the ideal food prep workflow scheme. For those of you that haven’t, the idea is that the chef du jour should be able to quickly and efficiently move between the refrigerator, the stove and the sink, without bumping into anything and with a minimum of wasted energy.

There are even hard figures worked into the triangle: Experts say that each “side” of the triangle should be no shorter than four feet and no greater than nine, and that the perimeter of the entire triangle should be no less than 12 feet and no greater than 26. (Although frankly speaking, if I could afford a kitchen big enough that the triangle was larger than 26 feet, I probably wouldn’t be doing any of the cooking myself.)

The neat thing about the kitchen triangle is that it works in a variety of kitchen shapes, as you can see in the illustrations below, from Merillat Cabinetry.

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When designing a bathroom or kitchen, our choice of a faucet is perhaps the most important aesthetic decision we’ll make; the tap is the most prominent symbol of the never-ending supply of running water we’ll use throughout our lives. Not to mention we’ll have ample time to appreciate a beautiful and well-made faucet, interacting with it perhaps dozens of times a day.

It’s worth remembering a time when the most aesthetically amazing part of our water supply was not inside our dwellings, but outside of them, as part of the system that brought water there in the first place: Roman aqueducts. These staggeringly complicated feats of engineering once criss-crossed Europe and northern Africa, constructed over a period of 500 years and painstakingly maintained.
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Could you live without straight lines?

Think about it: The only perfectly straight lines that a caveman would ever see were sunbeams. In short, straight lines are rarely seen in nature, yet our homes and our cities are filled with them.

The maverick Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser called straight lines “the devil’s tools,” and felt that straight lines “make people sick because, not occurring in nature, they incessantly subject people to an irritation for which the organism is unprepared.”

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Some of us city dwellers are lucky enough to have access to Farmer’s Markets, where fresh produce is widely available. But all of those crops are brought into the city on trucks. Imagine, then, if we could take the subway or even cross the street to get to a farm.

The urban farm, or more accurately the vertical farm, may one day become a widespread reality, out of necessity. According to the Vertical Farm Project,

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No matter how different our cultures may be, every dwelling in the civilized world has some sort of toilet in it. And all of us toilet-users do one of two things with it; let’s call those #1 and #2.

Both #1 and #2 can be used as fertilizer, but due to their respective chemical backgrounds, not together.

In our sewage systems, #1 and #2 are normally combined, and then the resultant mixture goes to a sewage cleaning plant. Such plants require lots of power, because separating #1 and #2 is an energy-intensive task.

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While we take it for granted that we can turn on the tap and get water whenever we want, imagine if you lived in the Sahara Desert. And never mind your own personal water needs, imagine if you had entire fields full of crops you had to hydrate.

That is the aim of the Sahara Forest Project, an ambitious undertaking to bring fresh water to one of the more barren places on Earth. The project utilizes two technologies: The Seawater Greenhouse, and concentrated Solar Power. As reported in Inhabitat,

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During a backpacking trip to Italy, I watched a fellow backpacker being chastised by our Italian hostess. Said backpacker had picked some lovely flowers and handed them to our hostess as a gift–upside-down, which is a huge no-no as it’s considered bad luck.

Hopefully they’d be a little more tolerant with upside-down potted plants. The Boskke Sky Planter is an inverted pot-and-plant combo, with a special internal reservoir system integrated into the pot that gets water to the roots without leaking. The unique design means you only have to water the plant every 20-30 days, with the end result being that it uses 80% less water!

In addition to the water conservation angle, the Sky Planter has an obvious home-decorating benefit–it takes up less floorspace, and is one less thing for the vacuum or Roomba to bump into. Not to mention you don’t have to worry about Fido rummaging through it, unless he’s got incredible leaping skills and/or you have an extremely low ceiling.
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