UNUSUAL
Added on: 27th Sep 2014
Library desk made of recycled books
Clock made from a Recycled Bike Wheel
In JukkasjÀrvi, a village in Sweden within the Arctic circle,
each year a hotel constructed entirely out of ice is built.
Every room is a display of art carved in ice. Even the beds
are blocks of ice, though spread with reindeer skins.
When the summer comes and the hotel melts visitors
are offered the ability to stay in rooms of ice maintained
in a freezer building. Because water has such a highly specific
heat capacity it requires a large amount of energy to melt ice.
The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Thailand is
constructed from a million glass beer bottles.
Decorative mosaics at the temple are constructed from
beer bottle lids. The mixture of brown and green glass allowed
the incorporation of intricate patterns within the temple’s walls.
Since the walls are coloured glass they allow for privacy
but also a beautiful but diffuse light to spread throughout
the buildings. The monks who built the temple wished
to highlight the wasteful nature of consumption and the
possibility of reclaiming beauty from rubbish. Since glass is
rather too brittle to make a complete structure, the temple does
have a concrete core to support its weight.
The house is designed as a giant three-dimensional sundial,
set on a fixed angle in relationship to the sun's movements to
provide shade during the summer months, keeping the inside
temperature cool, and during Fall, Winter and Spring sunlight
enters the large windows as the sun's position is lower in the sky,
thus warming the living space.
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