Rogue Habits

Standing Desk Meets Brutalist Design

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Your word for the day is "brutalism," which does not derive from the word "brutal" but in fact from a French term for "exposed concrete." Brutalism is all about designing something to look solid, industrial, fortified, and purpose-driven. So, this standing desk space is a minimalist tribute to workaholics everywhere. This efficient office space makes use [...]

Wild Souls Unleashed In A Concrete Jungle: The Art of Man One

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Drive along a Southern California freeway, say the 110 out of LAX or the 5 south from Hollywood. Take an offramp late at night, spiral down a cloverleaf, and come to an intersection where a concrete wall confronts you with a savagely beautiful face made of angles and colors. You couldn't be any more startled than if you'd been beating brush by machete throug[...]

The Skyline of Tomorrow: Green Roof Architecture

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It's finally happening. Those of us who grew up reading science fiction, filled with flying cars and instant fabrication of foodstuffs, became disappointed to not see a lot of those ideas come to pass. Mostly we just got the dystopian government. But once in awhile, a change does give us a glimmer of hope that maybe Larry Niven or Isaac Asimov got one right [...]

Forgotten Dreams in Basic Black: Designer Derek Andrew Wong

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The first requirement of any artist is to have a vision. That vision is something that you're born possessing. You don't pick it, it picks you. And whatever that vision is, be it quirky and refreshing or dark and disturbing, you're the messenger charged with bringing it to a world which may not even understand it. It's a scary thing, to put yourself out ther[...]

A Prodigious Playground of Piled Pallets: Enter Palletfest

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"Upcycling" sounds like one of those words coined by Faith Popcorn to make recycling sound twee. That's actually not too far off; the first recorded usage of the term was by Reiner Pilz in 1994, complaining that re-purposed industrial by-products were broken up instead of anybody thinking how to use them in their present form. When you melt a bottle down to [...]

Hamster Wheel Desk: Innovative Office Furniture or Snarky Capitalist Satire?

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Let's make one thing perfectly clear: The human body is evolved to run. We survived up the evolutionary food chain to become the dominant species on the planet not by our brains or brawn, but by our tootsies. Cheetahs may sprint faster in short bursts, but we humans win by sheer persistence. Contrary to the popular notion that we hunted with spears and arrow[...]

Capsula Mundi: We Are All Branches On the Tree of Life

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The dead vastly outnumber the living, bringing to focus the unnoticed problem of funerary pollution. The old, wasteful interment into the ground or a crypt, in a fully decked coffin, eats up real estate and consumes resources. The new, environmentally conscious citizen wants to stay respectful of Mother Earth even upon returning to her bosom. So was born the[...]

Weather Forecasting With the Tempo Drop

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The Tempo Drop is an elegantly simple device for weather prediction, using a mixture of water, ethanol, and camphor sealed in a crystal teardrop. As a modern version of a storm glass, the forecaster makes for an infinitely more romantic approach to checking the weather than an app. Indeed, reading the tempo drop is a sophisticated art in itself. At it[...]

Alfredo Rodríguez: Sounds of Cuban Jazz Space

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Step off your back porch on a late summer night, and if you're lucky enough to live outside the city and its caterwaul, you'll hear the rhythms of nature: crickets and katydids in chorus, cicadas keeping the beat, the stately declaration of an owl. This is nature's jazz. Rationally, the sounds would fall together in a odd intermingling, and yet, they fall to[...]

Multipurpose Transforming Furniture Makes Clever Use of a Russian Cottage

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Whenever a new multiform furniture design comes out, one is brought back to the 1938 Disney short cartoon, "Mickey's Trailer." Despite the haphazard misadventures of Mickey, Goofy, and Donald on the road, you can't help but admire the clever design as bedrooms convert into bathrooms with a drawn bath in a zipper-opened bathtub. Surely this cartoon must be th[...]

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Pete Trbovich