Thursday, April 25, 2024
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
SUFF & UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD
“The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.”
Jack Gilbert
Friday, March 29, 2024
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
An ecological atypical house built with plastic bottles
Discover in this article, the very first village composed of a new kind of atypical dwelling built in plastic bottle. This original idea has made it possible to recycle more than a million plastic bottles. This will eventually make it possible to build 120 ecological houses on the island of Colon in Panama.
An atypical house built with plastic bottles
Many ideas are springing up on the internet regarding the recycling of plastic bottles. However, its use as an insulating material is a first and risks giving ideas to many builders who wish to self-build an atypical and ecological house.
This new concept of atypical housing was imagined by Robert Bezeau who wishes to extend it to an entire village. Originally from Canada, he wishes to preserve the natural environment of the island, located in the Caribbean and more precisely in Panama . To do this, he collects plastic bottles, but also different materials, from local landfills in order to build these ecological and atypical houses .
The first atypical dwelling built allowed the recycling of more than 10,000 bottles. The use of plastic bottles for this atypical dwelling has not only made it possible to reduce its cost and to recycle waste. This has made it possible to insulate it so that the temperature inside the dwellings is 17 degrees colder than the temperatures outside.
In addition to having a perfect insulating action, the use of plastic bottles to build this kind of atypical dwelling saves considerable time in construction. This also makes it possible to have really low production costs.
To build this type of atypical dwelling, you need a steel structure to contain all the plastic bottles. Finally, to finish, you cover it with concrete. The use of an iron frame allows it to be earthquake proof.
A desire to change the world
Robert Bezeau's dream is to change the world without changing the earth. He wishes to do this by building one economic house at a time. Of course, his dream is not that we build eco-houses with plastic bottles all over the planet, because this scenario is specific to his island and his desire to recycle plastic bottles on it.
Many ideas are springing up every day regarding much more environmentally friendly construction methods and many are taking their cue from his example. And you, how would you like to build your atypical home?
What might we recycle where we live?
Sunday, April 24, 2022
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Resources Acknowledged
Scraps are full of potential. They are the raw materials used to fulfill both practical and creative endeavors — a patch on a pair of jeans or the makings of a cherished quilt. Yet the industrial equivalent of household scraps— remnants from yarn, textile, and clothing production — clog landfills in the United States and around the world.
The textile and apparel industries are among the most polluting in the world, second only to oil. How can we rethink the design and production process in order to recover waste materials before they impact the environment? Can textile waste become even higher value textile products?
Scraps: Fashion, Textiles, and Creative Reuse focuses on three designers who use textile scraps as the creative impetus for their work: Luisa Cevese, founder of Riedizioni in Milan, Italy, Christina Kim, founder of the Los Angeles-based fashion brand dosa, and Reiko Sudo, managing director of Japanese textile company NUNO. All three share a deep respect for the history and tradition of textile making, and a commitment to design’s environmental, social, and economic responsibilities.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Sunday, August 23, 2020
BOROnow
Japanese indigo "Boro" about 150 years old. Those who couldn't afford a new roll of cloths aquired scraps of cotton kimonos and patched and stitched them to make work wears. Worn and repaired again and again from generations to generations. Boro (ぼろ) are a class of Japanese textiles that have been mended or patched together. The term is derived from the Japanese term "boroboro", meaning something tattered or repaired.
The term 'boro' typically refers to cotton, linen and hemp materials, mostly hand-woven by peasant farmers, that have been stitched or re-woven together to create an often many-layered material used for warm, practical clothing. Historically, it was more economical to grow, spin, dye, weave and make one's own clothing over buying new garments, and equally as economical to re-use old, worn-out clothing as fabric for new garments; warmer fibres such as cotton were also less commonly available, leading to the development of layering as a necessity in the creation of lower-class clothing.
Boro textiles are typically dyed with indigo dyestuff, historically having been the cheapest and easiest-to-grow dyestuff available to the lower classes. Many examples of boro feature kasuri dyework, and most extant examples of boro today are antiques or modern reproductions made as a craft project, with the introduction of cheaper ready-to-wear clothing to early 20th-century Japan rendering the creation of boro mostly unnecessary.
Yet with water thirsty cotton crops producing textiles that are increasingly being conisgined to LANDfill boro, and like traditions in other cultural sttings/realities, does offer a paradigm within which to imagine an alternative 21st C WORLDview.
Here we might consider the traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō), suffering (苦, ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū).
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.
The term 'boro' typically refers to cotton, linen and hemp materials, mostly hand-woven by peasant farmers, that have been stitched or re-woven together to create an often many-layered material used for warm, practical clothing. Historically, it was more economical to grow, spin, dye, weave and make one's own clothing over buying new garments, and equally as economical to re-use old, worn-out clothing as fabric for new garments; warmer fibres such as cotton were also less commonly available, leading to the development of layering as a necessity in the creation of lower-class clothing.
Boro textiles are typically dyed with indigo dyestuff, historically having been the cheapest and easiest-to-grow dyestuff available to the lower classes. Many examples of boro feature kasuri dyework, and most extant examples of boro today are antiques or modern reproductions made as a craft project, with the introduction of cheaper ready-to-wear clothing to early 20th-century Japan rendering the creation of boro mostly unnecessary.
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