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New Eco

November 17, 2009 | New Eco | by Chris Nolan |

Three Australian mates have teamed up to create an environmentally friendly alternative to the wire hanger. Seeing the gap in the market for a hanger that doesn’t take a hundred years to break down, the guys over at Green Hanger took it upon themselves to design and distribute a 100 percent recyclable cardboard hanger. Not only can these be used in the household and in shops, but also at your local dry cleaners. At present, you can get this simple yet clever design at select Australian retailers with the overseas market soon to be opened up. Read more

November 16, 2009 | New Eco | by Katriane Hill |

This year’s SEMA show in Las Vegas was home to several electric vehicles, yet the eVaro seems to have garnered the most attention, boasting zero carbon emissions for 90 per cent of the time spent on the road and an impressive mpg of 275. Read more

November 13, 2009 | New Eco | by Katriane Hill |

Pratt Manhattan Gallery, in a show guest curated by Francesca Granata (Parsons School for Design Lecturer) and Sarah Scaturro (adjunct instructor for Fashion Institute of Technology), takes a look at American eco-fashion visionaries — such as Alabama Chanin [above], Uluru, Loomstate, and others. Read more

November 11, 2009 | New Eco | by Katriane Hill |

Philadelphia’s 58-floor Comcast building has been awarded the Gold Certification for LEED-CS (core and shell). The obelisk-formed building, which sits right above the Suburban railway station, boasts high performance glass and sunscreens, which helps keep out 60 per cent of the sun’s heat and contains 70 per cent of the site’s available light. The building also boasts high-efficiency water utilities, allowing for 40 per cent less of water consumption than a traditional office building. The building, Gold certified LEED by the architect Robert A.M. Stern, is one of the first, but certainly not the last, skyscraper to get certified.

November 7, 2009 | New Eco | by Casper Johansson |

Gizmodo ran this story recently that they suggest is proof that birds are secretly composers: ‘A normal person sees these birds perched on electrical wires and worries about getting crapped on. Jarbas Agnelli looks at them and sees musical notes. Maybe he’s smarter than the rest of us because the melody is utterly oh-so-sweet-that-I-could-doze-off-right-now’.

November 3, 2009 | New Eco | by Casper Johansson |

Swedish tea company Johan & Nyström’s fourteen luxury teas — Teasy T Exclusive — are packaged in eco-friendly bamboo tubes designed by Seforma.

October 26, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of about thirty artists, musicians and performers who hail from across the United States. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, the group floated down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a flotilla of handmade rafts. Crafted mainly from junk and recycled materials, the rafts ran on wind and solar power, were fuelled by bio-diesel, and their crew subsisted on rainwater and dumpstered meals for the entire journey.  Read more

October 23, 2009 | New Eco | by Zolton |

Where were these things when I was a kid? Sure beats the rusty swingset my grandfather had embedded into his concrete yard. Ouch! Soft skin and hard surfaces do not go together well! This chemical free Playset is made from Northern White Cedar and is environmentally friendly in every way imaginable, right down to the ten percent of CedarWorks profits that are given to organizations which support kids and the environment.

October 21, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |

Eve and Eryn, two amazing Free Spirit Sphere tree houses, are located in Vancouver, Canada, high up in the canopy of the West Coast rainforest. They are, as their creators describe, ’suspended like pendants from a web of rope’ from the trees. This is a unique way of creating unobtrusive means of living amongst nature. Insulated and set up for one or two people to stay in, these spheres allow people to experience the ‘energy shift’ that occurs ‘once one breaks contact with the ground’. Read more

October 8, 2009 | New Eco | by Casper Johansson |

Working around the theme, Small is Beautiful, this eco-friendly mobile home design by Slovakia-based Nice Architects is totally self-sufficient in regards to energy, water and waste, and at 270 sq feet, is big enough to provide comfortable living space for two people. Very nice indeed. Read more

October 7, 2009 | New Eco | by Casper Johansson |

These is very clever design by the partnership of Bo-Young Jung and Emmanuel Wolfs, who work collaboratively under the name, Draw Me a Sheep. Inspired by the ongoing debate over how we use our natural resources, they have created a series of chairs made exclusively from great chunks of wood. Wonder how comfy it would be, though? Read more

October 1, 2009 | New Eco | by Zolton |

Working exclusively with PET bottles, Malaysian designers Lisa Foo and Su Sim have produced these creative-looking lamps, which will work inside your home or in more remote locations such as outdoor parks and plazas. Read more

September 26, 2009 | New Eco | by Katriane Hill |

Paris-based design firm Off Architecture, in collaboration with Duncan Lewis Scape Architecture and Jeans Gincinto, is granting a gift for current and future students of the Lycee Jean Moulin in Revin, France. The Lycee, which will be completed sometime in 2012, is being constructed to sustainable standards, including being built with the flow of the hillside where it resides. The school’s blueprint is a single-floor construction with terraced floors moving up the hill. The roofs of each building is made to resembling the rolling landscape and is flooded with vegetation so that by air, the school nearly disappears. In what promises to be the first of many sustainable lycees in France, the bar is set extremely high.

September 22, 2009 | New Eco | by Melissa Banigan |

A styrofoam beer cooler, a cheap camera, a little helium, and $150, goes a long way — a whopping eighteen miles into the stratosphere. Two MIT students have proven that DIY is a much more cost efficient way of taking pictures of the curvature of Earth than any of NASA’s costly programs.

September 17, 2009 | New Eco | by Casper Johansson |

With cool packaging designed by Bulldog, Foxglo lightbulbs were launched to complement the shift in Europe towards basic green ideas, more ’specifically, a shift from use of incandescent light bulbs to more energy efficient, compact florescent lighting’. [photo via the Dieline]

 

New York-based, Australian art director Deanne Cheuk — an occasional contributor to Lost At E Minor — is one of the most adventurous and creative designers around. Her work on Tokion magazine, in particular, for which she shaped the visual direction over several years, was inspiring, pushing the boundaries by incorporating illustration, offbeat color touches and avoiding the straight portrait shots which seem to dominate the front window of every inner-city newsagency.


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With literally almost half its population immigrants, Queens is the best borough for food in NYC. Between Thai food in Woodside and any ethnic food you’ve ever imagined in Jackson Heights, all foodies worth their salt make regular pilgrimages on the 7 train. If you find yourself at the end of the line in Flushing, check out Little Pepper on Roosevelt. Read more

Australian designer Ruby Smallbone takes us into the chill of Winter with clockwork pieces and sharp cuts. This Sydney-based label is fast becoming an international hit with its distinct mix of European tailoring and street-inspired style. Ruby Smallbone’s Winter 09 collection proves there is a fine line between art and fashion, creating the perfect fusion of luxury fabrics within a creative and unexpected aesthetic.


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Oh man, the work of New York based artist Inka Essenhigh is so good it makes my eyes water. Read more

Says Yuko Shimizu on the artwork of legendary Japanese illustrator Katsushika Hokusai: ‘I was just at Kinokuniya Bookstore [a Japanese book store at Rockefeller Center in New York] a few days ago and bought The Complete Hokusai-Manga Sketchbooks [published by Shogakukan]. It was $150, but worth every penny with its mind-blowing works of art by Katsushika Hokusai from cover to cover’
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Australian group Pivot have recently signed with the mighty Warp label and — even better (well, for us anyway) — have written a fun Secret Playlist for us. You can see where the many disparate influences have seeped into their latest recording, the beautiful and colourful, O Soundtrack My Heart.

It’s the final, sultry day of Barcelona’s experimental sound-fest, Sonar, and weary punters are gazing listlessly at an empty, smoke-filled stage. Before long, a vocalist, beatboxer and grand pianist stride on, and what follows is a startling and, at times, deeply melancholic cabaret-electronic hybrid, prompting jaws to drop and delighting the drowsy. Meet Khan of Finland: ‘I tell stories about my everyday life; they are songs about love, pain, party and spirituality. I would call it bionic blues’.

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WE'RE RESPECTING

WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST

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Scanners’ new single Salvation

I love this track by London based rock group, Scanners, which is off their latest album, Submarine. Having toured with acts such as The Horrors, The Wedding Present, The Charlatans, Electric Six, and Juliette & The Licks, Scanners could well blow up in 2010. Figuratively speaking, not literally. No, that wouldn’t be fun.

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Paolo Ventura

Italian-born, New York City-based photographer Paolo Ventura creates fairy-tale like pictures out of amazingly constructed, miniature dioramas that almost trick the eye into thinking he’s a tilt-shift photographer. Read more

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Amazing cake designs by Charm City Cakes

Baltimore company Charm City Cakes produces the most innovative wedding and party cakes on the market. Inspiration for these creative bakers comes from everywhere: art, fabric, furniture, architecture, landscapes, science, and music, and each cake is individually designed to match your personality, and the theme of the occasion you are celebrating. Don’t miss these cakey engineering masterpieces. Read more

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Cardboard shoes

With the recession still biting, it may be time to whip out the glue and the cardboard and make your next pair of cool kicks. Don’t know how they’d manage in the rain though? Read more

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T-post: the world’s first wearable magazine

So here’s the scoop. Every six weeks, T-post subscribers get a new t shirt issue in the mail, with a news story on the inside and an artist interpretation of that story on the front. Yes, we agree. It’s clever, clever. Read more


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Thanks to Sony Australia, four Lost At E Minor readers will win personal audio prizes, including the new 8GB Walkman S series video MP3 player and the MDRXB500 Extra Bass headphones. Read more

The Plus One t shirt by New York designer Ryan Sullivan is printed by hand, one at a time, using a dye-based print and printed on cotton/poly blend tees. Size is true to fit.
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