UNUSUAL

Library desk made of recycled books

Clock made from a Recycled Bike Wheel

In Jukkasjärvi, 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.