Come Up to My Room
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 03. 2.07
We attended the alternative design event 'Come Up to My Room" at the Gladstone Hotel (and showed Castor's lighting display earlier) but had to wait until Mocoloco's Harry Wakefield posted it because he really takes a fine photograph.
Shawn Moore and Julie Nicholson are MADE, a new store in Toronto that highlights their own work and those of other artists. They take that common building block of every pre-IKEA student apartment, the milk crate, and upcycle it into an entire line of furniture, including this chandelier, footstools and desks. Milk crates are "a mass-produced item whose ubiquitous design offers many variations in colour and patterning" Incomprehensible Flash website of the day at ::Made
stools from MADE
Christina Covello and Andrew Reesor scoured furniture and wood shops for scraps and used them to recreate the classic early Canadian settlers chair. However where we are used to uniformity in such common objects, in this case every one is different because of the mix of woods. "the creative combination of scrap, craft and innovation." website coming soon at ::Covello Reesor
See more fabulous but non-recycled stuff at ::Mocoloco
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Of all the items that can and should be upcycled, milk crates must be among the least urgent. Unless they are severely damaged, these remain immensely useful to all sorts of people--not just as dorm room furniture.
Not to belittle the effort here, but I think there are single-use objects more routinely sent to landfill that need rescuing much more than these crates, which tend to be very long-lived.
*cough* incandescents *cough*