Two years ago I was
interviewed about the future of the green kitchen, and suggested it might look much like
Donald Chong's design , saying:
Local food, fresh ingredients, the slow food movement; these are all the rage these days. A green kitchen will have big work areas and sinks for preserving, tons of storage to keep it in, but will not have a four foot wide fridge or a six burner Viking range. It will open to outdoors to vent the heat in summer, to the rest of the house to retain the heat in winter. The dining area will be integrated into it, perhaps right in the middle. A green kitchen will be like grandma's farm kitchen- big, open, the focus of the house and no energy from the appliances will be wasted in winter or kept inside in summer.
It hasn't happened yet, but there have been a lot of new ideas in how you design a kitchen, what you put in it, where it goes when you are not using it. We look at some of the sliding, changing reinventions of the kitchen....
Mark Bittman, Food columnist for the New York Times,
describes what he needs in a kitchen: "A stove, a sink, a refrigerator, some pots and pans, a knife and some serving spoons,All else is optional." Yet people keep producing single-function thingies that are rarely used and take up so much space that kitchens have ballooned in size to accommodate them all. (the Unclutterer calls them
Unitaskers and just got around to covering our favorite
Butter Cutter)
In honor of Yom Kippur, a day where one doesn't eat anything, let alone bacon, I present the WowBacon, a device that does nothing but drape bacon over a vertical divider so that you can nuke it into crispy submission.
But wait, there's more!...
The Electrolux Design Lab competition always yields interesting results; this year competing industrial design students were asked to look way into the future, creating "Designs for the next 90 years." Swedish design student
Rickard Hederstierna took the top prize (€ 5000 and a six month paid internship) for Cocoon. He envisions a future where we grow our meat much like we make popcorn in a microwave....
Image via: Zappos.com
Zappos.com, that gigantic shoe website where you can get tasteful and tasteless (and even
vegan) shoes at cheap prices, now sells Recycled Glassware? Yep, and with a name like Highbury Collection of Recycled Glassware Serving Pieces, they're catering to the
elite greenies with pieces like this. Surprise: the name may be highbrow, but the prices aren't. ...
Kitchens that fold up and go away are a regular feature on TreeHugger; we love ideas that show how space can be used for multiple functions, and as
Bucky Fuller said,
"Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It's time we gave this some thought."
Piero Esposito of Targa Italia clearly gave it some thought, and came up with this very elegant design that folds up into a very simple box.
...
moormann. Larger image here
We talk a lot about
multifunction design, but also about minimalism and a place for everything, everything in its place. Therefore I am conflicted by this storage system shown on
Materialicious and designed by
Nils Holger Moorman a few years ago, where all your belongings get mounted on particular panels designed for a particular object.
No wait, it gets worse....
Modern Mechanix shows us how to save energy and time in the laundry room:
Sound Waves get your wash clean, claims Robert Bosch of Stuttgart, Germany. This seven-pound machine works on principle of auto horn. Hooter must sound for five minutes. Cost is $32.
...
Images via Core77
Typically kitchen tools come across the radar and they're
so specialized that (unless you're that kind of chef) they're mostly useless. A big part of quality, sustainable design is that whatever you're creating should have more than one use, so that you only need one consumable item to
accomplish multiple tasks. It cuts way back on the number of things we need to produce, consume, and dispose of. Here is one tool that embodies that principle - the Uni-tool from kitchenware company
Joseph Joseph. ...
If the meal calls for disposable plates, they may as well be biological nutrients that can be readily returned to the soil. Elegance doesn't hurt, either. These disposable plates, bowls, and serving dishes from VerTerra are made from fallen leaves, pressed into shape with nothing but heat and water. You can see from
our post last year that VerTerra's designs have evolved aesthetically, while retaining the same remarkably simple production process.
...
Image from Working Wonders
For the last days of summer eating outside--a plate with a purpose. And a tree for readers of this blog who like the theme.
Plates With Purpose is a series of specially designed glassware that is made out of post-industrial, pre-consumer recycled glass. A portion of the profits from their sales goes to non-profit groups.
Each piece is hand-cut, hand-coloured and shaped to give this one-off effect. Created by a Pennsylvania company,
Riverside Design Group, they come in 11 different themes, to benefit 11
different charities. ...
Photos by John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong via Dezeen
Studio Gorm built the Flow2 Kitchen for an exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Craft in Oregon; it is a "living kitchen where nature and technology are integrated in a symbiotic relationship, processes flow into one another in a natural cycle, efficiently utilizing energy, waste, water and other natural resources."
Dezeen shows us this very simple and clever demonstration that we don't need all of our expensive technologies and systems to store, prepare and get rid of the waste from food....
Image via James Dyson Award
One of the main reasons milk goes bad is its exposure to air. As you tip the carton, drenching your seventh bowl of
Chia Goodness Cereal you are getting rapidly closer to the moment of pouring the chunky remnants down the drain. What a waste.
A clever solution to this problem just might be
Fresh, the Shrinking Milk Jug. The refillable jug sits on the table while the user presses down on the top. With each press, the air void in the container is eliminated, keeping the milk fresher longer; up to a week longer, according to its inventor....
Kitchen islands can take up a lot of space.
Justin at Materialicious found this clever idea from Italian kitchen manufacturer
Xera: the wood counter slides out, providing a place to sit or work, while exposing the sink and range when opened. Clean up after dinner and slide it back, and the kitchen essentially disappears.
...
Summer kitchens were very common a hundred years ago; a stove took a long time to heat up and cool down, and if you used it in the summer it would make the whole house unbearable. Then gas and electric ranges came into use, heating up much more quickly, and we got air conditioning, so we could use fuel to make the heat and use more fuel to take it away.
But it still makes some sense to move the heat outside in the summer. It is also very social; you might get away with a smaller kitchen and dining area inside if you are like most of us in northern climates who hide inside ten months of the year and party all summer.
Estonian architects Urmas Muru and Peeter Pere have built a lovely one....
Mode All In One Recycling Center Features. Image via: Mode
For communities that don't allow you to just toss all of your recyclables in one bin and leave them by the curb comes the
Deluxe All-in-One-Recycling Center by Mode. It combines, it organizes, it eliminates odors and it even reminds - what will they think of next when it comes to organizing rubbish?...
Sometimes we just slap ourselves upside the head and say "how did I ever live without that?" That is why we have such big kitchens- to house our
garlic express, our
soda can disenfector, butter cutter and the
automatic martini maker. But now we have to add on to provide room for the Rotato.
This amazing device uses electricity to remove the vitamin-packed skin of the potato, leaving you with just the inner carbo goodness....
This is the way we should think about design. In most kitchens, there is a cupboard, a sink and a dishwasher. You empty the dishwasher by moving everything to the cupboard. Peter Schwartz and Helene Steiner of Wachshaus integrate them all together in this sink/dishwasher and storage concept....
The EcoloBlue Atmospheric Water Generator. Image supplied by EcoloBlue.
Imagine a machine that makes clean water out of the air. It might sound crazy, but it exists, and you can get one for your home. It's name? The EcoloBlue Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG). To be honest, I was a little skeptical when I got an email about this product, but the more I learned about it, the more interested I grew—and I'm not the only one.
Organizers of the
Green Inaugural Ball nixed bottled water for an EcoloBlue machine, and the
Global Green Pre-Oscar Party—supported and attended by
Leonardo DiCaprio,
Rosario Dawson and Neil Patrick Harris to name just a few—also had EcoloBlue's AWG on hand. ...
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the
if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
on 11. 5.09
Image: NatureMill
Photo credit: Bambu
This past week's 
Architect Donald Chong taught us that 
