Artists like Japanese-born Yuken Teruya who can see beautiful shapes, patterns, and forms hiding within toilet paper rolls, discarded pizza boxes, and junk food bring contemporary artistic practice back into the realm of innocence and life affirming beauty. Anyone who can look at Teruya’s work and still scoff at the value of art lives a sad existence.

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Check out these images from the recent Castle on the Ocean papercraft festival in Tokyo. The creator of this impressive paper city is a university student by the name of Wataru Itou.

The Puyo is an environmentally friendly concept car designed by Honda. The vehicle is ultra-efficient, powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology, and has a unique aesthetic to boot. Literally. The sensual nature of this hydrogen fuel cell car also comes with a sense of transparency from its panoramic windows and intuitive operation. One of the coolest features of the Honda Puyo, however, is that the cabin rotates 360-degrees, so the car doesn’t have to go in reverse.

We used to depend on sundials back in the day, but now there are multiple ways to tell the time. And Tokyo Flash has just invented another one. Based on LED technology, these watches are not only stylish but futuristic and wildly innovative. They even have a watch from minimalist designer Naoto Fukasawa that is more than just your basic timepiece. The Tokyo Flash site says that their watches are supposed to ‘resemble the various moods of a human’, and they’re definitely an attention grabber. These are watches to take us right through to the 22nd century.

Man, going green is so hip these days, even Hello Kitty is getting in on the action. This is among the first character-branded solar chargers, which suggests that marketers are expecting sales of these sorts of devices to take off in the next few years.

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The young architect Junya Ishigami is pushing the boundaries of the weightless aesthetic stream of architecture. Here, for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, he has designed a glass and steel pavilion with a roof that floats on a sparse forest of thin steel columns or ‘flats’. The simple single storey volume is a studio for the general activity of ‘making things’, and contains no partitions whatsoever. Instead it has a series of furniture and plants scattered amongst the thin white columns. The lightness of this building is paramount and must engender such a feeling in all its users.

Sitting on a grass lawn may be pleasant, but it isn’t always elegant when you’re wearing nice clothes or you have back problems. The people at Japanese design firm Mindscape have taken the Chia Pet model and applied it to some pretty rad lawn furniture. Now you can have the best of both worlds — the soothing, chlorophyll-filled softness of grass and the ergonomic comfort of well-designed seats.

The My Town In My Home collection of hand-knitted fashion by Yoshikazu Yamagata and Mafuyu was exhibited at this year’s Amhem Mode Biennale in Amsterdam. Sure gives a new twist to the saying, ‘wherever I lay my hat …’ [see also the Brain Bag by Jun Takahashi]

Too beautiful to simply pass by, this is the Ring House by young Japanese architectural firm, TNA. Built on an unwanted piece of land owned by a developer, it creates a wonderful experience for the occupier and the passerby. The site of the building was driven by the avoidance of cutting down trees — only three were sacrificed in the process of making it.

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