Sunflower Seeds 2010 by Ai Weiwei

Re-blogged from dezeen.
Written by Rose Etherington.
Originally posted October 11, 2010.
Copyright © Dezeen Limited 2006-2010

“Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has covered the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London with more than 100 million individually handmade replica sunflower seeds.

>> more stunning photos after the jump

The (solar) power of art.

When I hear the words “solar power,” I tend to visualize metallic blue panels glistening with sunlight in some desert-based technology lab. Or sometimes on a really cool roof on an eco-friendly home. It turns out there’s also some neat solar-powered art happening these days. Check these three out:

“A light sculpture called CO2LED, by Jack Sanders, Robert Gay, and Butch Anthony. In the median of Ft Meyer Dr, outside downtown Rosslyn. Arlington, VA.” Photo from flickr user M.V. Jantzen

“Chariot II-I Iike America and America likes me” is made from a crashed car frame that artist Matthew Day Jackson rescued from his race car-driving cousin. The car rests on a series of lights powered by a solar array installed on the building’s roof, thanks to the innovative MIT facilities department. Photo courtesy of MIT List Visual Arts Center

Anonymous glowing shoes seen in Richmond, VA. Via the Wooster Collective.

May28’s daily design idea is think outside the box (and beyond the power outlet) when designing. Don’t leave the use of solar power to just the electrical engineers and eco-friendly contractors.

Daily Design Idea will be on vacation for Memorial Day weekend. Enjoy the holiday! See you back here June 1st.

An invitation to smash (or at least try).

An installation by David Belt officially opened to an invite-only guest list today. I’m guessing the biggest reason it’s not public (as of yet) is that it’s potentially dangerous in addition to being incredibly fun. The installation is cleverly called Glassphemy!, and it provides a structure for people to chuck glass bottles (often in the direction of exterior viewers) that then smash into small glass pieces. “The purpose behind all this cathartic mayhem?” writes Paul Hiebert for Flavorpill, “To make recycling cool.” Belt’s goal is to turn the broken glass into recycled material for a tbd project with his company MacroSea.

The reason this installation is so alluring is that it asks participants to intentionally break glass, which means breaking the rules. A similar strategy was recently employed in Vancouver in 3M’s bus stop “poster” for safety glass.

May 20’s daily design idea is just like being the “cool mom”, letting people break rules can be an excellent way to engage them in your design.

More context, more voids, more Salcedo.

After writing about Doris Salcedo‘s piece ‘Tribute to Hans Haacke and Edward Fry,’ I started digging up more and more work by Salcedo. The 50-something Colombian artist has shown some really powerful pieces around the world. While almost everything she’s created seems to be socially charged, dealing with difficult human struggles such as class prejudice and individual self-deception, the pieces still maintain a delicateness that makes it easy to contemplate them and difficult to feel offended. I’ve posted two of my favorites here:

Salcedo filled an empty lot with nearly 1,600 chairs during the 8th Istanbul Biennial, 2003

‘Shibboleth‘ at the Tate Modern, 2007-2008

April 25’s daily design idea is when designing something new, consider filling (or creating) a void.

Celebrate with yellow.

A widespread use of yellow usually requires quite a lot of chutzpah in the world of design, but that shouldn’t stop you from working with it. It certainly hasn’t stopped interior designer Kelly Wearstler, whose 2004 book Modern Glamour is filled (and covered) with bold yellow elements.

I personally love yellow when it’s used joyfully, like in the Fresh Flower Pavilion designed by Tonkin Liu for the 2008 London Festival of Architecture.

Fresh Flower Pavilion

Another one of my favorite yellow projects is the installation Bloom, done in 2007 by Goldsmiths student Sam Spencer in Wapping. (For another fun project with umbrellas, check out the Bucky Bar).

Bloom

April 18’s daily design idea is when given the option, choose yellow (at least sometimes).

Memorial tunnels.

Artist and architect Maya Lin, famous for her stunning site-specific pieces and for her design of the Vietnam War Memorial as a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale, has an enormous multimedia project underway. What is Missing? is an international collection of “science-based artworks” that call attention to mass extinction and encourage the prevention of deforestation. Last September, Lin’s Listening Cone was unveiled in California.

Maya Lin’s Listening Cone

A few years earlier, sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck created their own unrelated tribute to a different kind of extinction. In a project called Inversion, they transformed two houses of the Art League Houston into a mind-blowing installation a few months before the houses were demolished.

Havel and Ruck’s Inversion

April 15’s daily design idea is check out Maya Lin’s video installation for What is Missing?, which you can see in person in Times Square from April 15-April 30.