Tag: Wayback Machine - Page 8
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1939: Who Needs Folding Bikes? Soon We Will Have Folding Cars
This 1939 design for a solar powered folding car is interesting and a bit silly, but was based on the predictions of a Professor about a future of stronger materials and metals. What requires so much weight in automobile engines or bodies, in giant
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P.J. O'Rourke on Disney's Home of the Future
A while back we wrote about Disney's New Dream Home: Worse Than We Dreamed, the new stupid and ugly electronic McMansion that is the idiocratic update of the Monsanto House of the Future, and noted that Walt must be spinning in his cryogenic cylinder
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Thermo-Con House
Just after World War II the US Army experimented with a lot of different housing technologies (see 58 Lustron Homes Being Given Away). This International Style gem was built in 1949 out of Thermo-Con, a "combination of Portland cement, water, aluminum
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1955: It's New! Biking with Kids!
Oh, for the days before seat belts and helmets, kids had so much more fun. Perhaps those awning frames could be turned into roll-bar safety cages. Modern
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Stair of the Week: The Well of Chand Baori
The stepwell at Chand Baori, India, is a hundred feet deep and has 3500 steps. Legend says that it has so many steps to make it impossible for someone to retrieve a coin if it is dropped into the well.
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New Town in Canadian Wilderness by Philip Johnson
It is hard to build in Washington DC; there is a lot of history and a lot of approvals required. Surprisingly, it is easier to build there than it is the Canadian wilderness; that is what philanthropist Joseph Hirshhorn found out when he tried to
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Recycling TreeHugger: Celebrating Thanksgiving & What It Stands For
Today is Turkey Day (or Tofurky Day, depending on your gastronomic persuasion) here in the States, where the holiday allows us a day to gather with family and friends, gorge on food and drink
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Kitchen of Tomorrow from 1943
It's Monday, so Google must have rolled out another new feature to waste our day. Now that I have made my email look prettier I can move on to their new picture gallery of thousands of shots from Life Magazine. One amazing set found by Laure at Dwell
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Mobile Woodworking Shop, 1938
We recently showed Paul Villinski's Emergency Response Studio that was a wood shop on wheels; Here is an interesting version from 1938 of a woodworking shop that would tour California schools. From Modern
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The Chair That Has Seated Millions
We often talk about the importance of good design in building a sustainable society, and have fewer better examples than the Thonet Chair. It is just six pieces of wood-two circles, two sticks and a couple of arches - held together by 10 screws and two
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Frugal Green Living: Posters for the Movement
"Frugal is the New Black" say the trendsetters. This isn't news to TreeHugger readers, nor is it particularly original; during the World Wars, that is how one lived. Sometimes people needed a little encouragement, so the the creatives got to work
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Change is Scary
Imagine what it was like to walk into a room and not know what to do. When the gas companies were spreading rumors that electricity is harmful to health and will affect the soundness of sleep. Fortunately, when something is such an immediate and
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Sound Mirrors
David Barrington
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1973: Toyota Station Wagon Turns into RV
With more and more Americans having to sleep in their cars, it is too bad that Toyota never put this into production. In case the copy is too small:
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GM Introduces Plug-in Hybrid- in 1969
Popular Science asked "wouldn't it be great to have a car that changed from electric drive for use around town to gasoline power for highway driving?" and GM answered with the XP-883.
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Galveston on Stilts
We have all seen the pictures of Galveston under water because of Hurricane Ike; The last time this happened six thousand people died. Instead of moving to higher ground, they moved higher ground to Galveston. Back in May, landscape website Pruned
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Cube Prefab by George Nelson
Full Disclosure: George Nelson is my favourite designer and I am sitting at a George Nelson desk. But besides doing wonderful furniture, in the sixties he tried his hand at modern prefab, and some of the ideas are relevant to today.
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Automobile Farming: Making Cars From Soybeans
Henry Ford once said "I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual products of the
