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8 Can Houses

As with bottle houses, there are also a few houses made out of cans. Tin can wall construction is not as popular as bottle wall construction. This may be due both to fact that the cans, by themselves, do not provide the cumulative tensile strength necessary for load-bearing walls. (Or perhaps bottles just win out over cans, on account of the stained glass window effect.)

Sometimes the cans are added to the houses later, either as a recycled kind of DIY aluminum siding or as decorative details.

(8 examples follow after the fold...)

Depression Milk Show

Left photo via EatMeDaily.com; right photo from the NY Food Museum website

Sort of ironic, that I only learn about this NY Food Museum show (in Brooklyn, just across the river from me) via Moscow-based PopSop website. But, it’s all good: A history of the “Consumer-Farmer Milk Cooperative” (which, in 1938, the Special Investigation Committee on Un-American Activities cited as a “communist-launched group.”)

The Over Spilt Milk show features: “Consumer-Farmer Milk Cooperative pamphlets and broadsides, vintage milk cartons, and miniature dioramas...”

I like the arcane tri-foil metal closure on the top of that carton. (I'm just making up my own terminology here—if you know a more accurate name for that type of carton please weigh in!)

The CFMC unveiled their paper milk carton in the first edition of The Link, praising its convenience: “Lighter than bottles to carry (one weighs only 2 oz.); no washing; more sanitary; no exposed pouring surface; closed spout prevents entrance of bacteria and dust.” The lightweight design also improved delivery efficiency. In 1943, Parodneck reported that a delivery route of 135 cases of paper cartons carried 2,700 quarts of milk, compared to the 1500 quarts carried by a bottle route of 125 cases. An emblem of Coop modernism, the paper carton’s convenience and efficiency was celebrated on promotional material, newsletters and at fancy dress parties: a Co-op office manager once attended a League of Mother’s Club Dance wearing “a green dress covered with Co-op literature, a necklace of vouchers, and on her head a ½ pint Co-op milk container.” It was the perfect outfit to characterize the triumphant fulfillment of the CMFC's mission.

–excerpted from the NY Food Museum website

(More photos and info about show, after the fold...)

Shrink-wrapped Meat Tray Packaging for Clothes

On left: “Human Meat” brand Bermuda shorts from Weird Clothing (via PopSop); on right: promotional, fund-raising package for a local zoo designed by Sydney-based Salad Design for WWF (World Wide Fund For Nature) and the Australian clothing company, Mooks (via Lovely Package)

Cross-referential packages that conflate tailors and butchers? Is there a mini-trend of clothing-packaged-like-perishable-meat? (If there are any more examples out there, then maybe so.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

logo translations

Fanta Arabic packaging, photo by Graphicology.

Kind of behind on this, but a while ago I saw this post on Serious Eats with a gallery of designer J. Jason Smith's (Graphicology) photos of English and Arabic versions of Western product packaging, mostly of food.

Always interesting to see a visual language applied across different (literal) languages, yes?

Tom Fruin

Another “discarded packaging as creative medium” story—(thanks to Daniel Wangelin’s comment)—similar to the previous post about El Anatsui. (And again I’m quoting an article by Gregg Cook...)

Tom Fruin noticed the postage-stamp-sized plastic baggies in front of his apartment building not long after his move to New York’s Lower East Side, in 1996. The bags had packaged drugs, he realized, but back in Los Angeles, where he grew up, he’d never noticed bags of such colors and patterns and tiny size.... “I was just wasting so much time looking at them that I started picking them up.”

Over the following months, he collected dozens, and he pushed them around on a table in his Brooklyn studio, arranging them side by side, sliding them inside one another, certain he had to make something of them, but not sure what. Finally he struck on the idea of stitching them together like patchwork quilts.

Tom Fruin’s bad habits,
Looking for beauty in the detritus of drug culture
Greg Cook, The Boston Phoenix, July 11, 2006

Although we’ve touched on the subject of drug packet branding before—(see Packaging Junk)—I get the feeling we have not yet scratched the surface.

(See a video of Fruin discussing his work, after the fold...)

El Anatsui

Another artist upcycling packaging into artwork:

The sculptor El Anatsui was out scavenging for materials near his home in Nsukka, Nigeria, one day in the late 1990s when he found a bag of discarded bottle caps. He kept them in his studio for several months until he hit on the idea of pounding them flat and stitching them together like patchwork fabrics....

“I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up. I think that’s what has been happening in Africa for a long time,” Anatsui said in a 2003 interview. “I believe that color is inherent in everything, and it’s possible to get color from around you, and that you’re better off picking something which relates to your circumstances and your environment than going to buy a ready-made color.”

Dartmouth showcases sculptor who turns junk into precious metals
Greg Cook, The Boston Globe,  February 24, 2007

(via The New York Times Magazine)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Bananagrams Pouch

At Toy Fair this past Sunday, I noticed this nice zippered pouch for Bananagrams’ Scrabble-like pieces. (Also cool: their spinner racks resemble banana trees.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

IDS09

I recently traveled to Toronto for the 2009 Interior Design Show. Besides being a great way to spot upcoming trends in colors, textures and styles, I also noticed how packages and package design played a role.

The first example was as student project from the Ryerson University’s School of Interior Design called NAPitat (shown above). Created from the remnants of large cardboard boxes and transformed into a dual purpose workstation and napping area (which one student gladly demonstrated for me), this piece struck me as not only reusing packaging but also impressed me with the intricate “dielines” that the students developed to create a piece that fit together without any fasteners. (168 hand cut pieces to be exact)

The next, and most direct, example of packaging used in interior design was this piece using silver upside-down bottle shaped feet. Now Randy can have bottle-footed furniture in his bottle shaped houses.

The remaining examples were packages chosen for their color and aesthetic qualities to help accent the displays, especially in kitchens and bathrooms. (Of course, Method had an appearance) Or perhaps they were suggestions of the preferred packages of Canandian interior designers, as if to say to be chic in the land of hockey and the mounted police, one simply must have (see photos) in one’s home.

Daniel Wangelin
[re]noun creative

Hotel Soap

Vintage Toledo Hotel soap. Photo by Flickr user Ms. Atomic. 

My job requires me to live in a hotel three nights a week, so I've gotten to know my hotel soaps pretty well. As a lover of all things miniature and complimentary, hotel soaps delight me to no end. The ones that I have now are more or less functional, but I've gotten really swanky-looking amenities, notably in hotels in Asia.

Hotel soap can have a large impact (negative or positive) on the image of comfort and/or luxury that a hotel is trying to provide. But it's uniquely challenging because it must be economical in terms of space as well as production costs.

In honor of hotel soap (and every mom's habit of collecting millions of them and hoarding them in a box under the sink... "just in case"), here's a roundup of some soaps I wish I had the good fortune of finding in my hotel bathroom.

Robots and Packaging

A Care-o-bot robot with beer bottle

Here are some pictures of robots handling packaging. Not those automated “packaging robots” that are used for packaging and palletization. These are service robots. (Or kitchen robots... or home-based helper robots, etc.) This is not the first time we’ve touched on the subject. (See: Talking Package)

It does makes sense that, if robots of this type are to be of any help to us, they’ll need to be capable of opening packages.

Top left: “The bottle-bot” built by John V-Neun and Chris Carnevale at Innovation First, Inc.  (see video after the fold); top right: IBM’s 1982 robotic system lifting an egg from the carton; middle left: the Asahi Beerbot; middle on right: The DLR Hand from German Aerospace Center; lower left: a Tomy Toys robot (via The Old Robots); lower right: Mr. Asahi, the bartender robot (see video here, and another after the fold)

(More photos of robots with packaging and 4 videos, after the fold...)

3-petal Lotus Splendor pack

An intriguing mechanism for Lancôme’s limited edition “Lotus Splendor” package.

“The lotus head splits open to reveal three petals containing lip and eye products and a mini mirror, each leaf hinges & clicks back neatly and seamlessly into the weighted base by using hidden magnetic closures.”

Although the design is said to based on the petals of a lotus flower, there is a polyhedral geometry at work that might also make this package appealing to those in robotics club. It even does that Weeble/Gömböc thing.

(via POPSOP)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Slave-Free Chocolate Packaging

Photo from RuSt’s Flickr Photostream

The anti-slave-labor brand with the wacky, retro typography—Tony’s Chocolonely is the creation of Dutch filmmaker, Teun Van de Keuken, who is rapidly becoming the Willy Wonka of human rights.

“I never thought I’d be a candy man,” says Van de Keuken with a laugh. “But that’s what the job asks from me for now.” Teun — or Tony — is certainly an unlikely chocolatier. A journalist and filmmaker, he produces a popular Michael Moore-style consumer advocacy TV program. But after learning that in Cote d’Ivoire, which produces some 40% of the world’s cocoa, tens of thousands of children are forced to work on plantations, many of them in virtual slavery, the chocolate lover became a chocolate maker.

“Slaves to Chocolate?” By Lauren Comiteau, Time Magazine, Friday,  May. 25,  2007 

Van de Keuken brought attention to this issue by personally consuming 19 chocolate bars and then trying (and failing) to get himself prosecuted in Dutch court for “knowingly buying a product made with slave labor”—and made a documentary film about it called “Tony and the Chocolate Factory.” (See the trailer is below:)

(Something else about Tony’s Chocolonely, after the fold...)

Fractal Bottle House

Photo of a bottle house in Sultana, CA from Matt (mister Goleta)’s Flickr Photostream

Why fractal? Because, as both a bottle-shaped building and a building made out of bottles, it has “self-similarity.”

In mathematics, a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts). Many objects in the real world, such as coastlines, are statistically self-similar: parts of them show the same statistical properties at many scales. Self-similarity is a typical property of fractals.

Wikipedia entry on self-similarity

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Tony Feher

“Just So” 2002 (upper photo from corestudio08’s Flickr Photostream; lower photo from My Fake Plastic Earth’s Flickr Photostream)

Tony Feher on his artwork and how he relates to objects:

“It's a very obsessive compulsive relationship.  I have seen news clips on this, where they go into a cluttered apartment in Manhattan and they are appalled at all the stuff someone has collected and cannot get rid of, like the old bagel on the floor that is 5 years old.  I see this and I think it's gorgeous! The color and the shape of the bagel, the texture...and I think, I have a bagel just like that!!!”

“When you peel the label off a plastic water bottle, you don't have the trappings of uniform or class that distinguishes it from others.  You are rendered to this anonymous generic bottle.  Some bottles are too loaded for me, ones that have an identity with the label off. It's more that I am taking advantage of a thing that was there, and how it feels and what it does with light and condensation. That is what catches my eye, like a sparkly chip of glass on the street.”

–from ArtSlant’s Interview with Tony Feher

 

Upper left: “Aspen” Off-site installation at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; upper right: “A Typical Colored Group” 2007; lower left: “Green” 2008; lower right: “Sour Gem” 2007

(More artwork by Tony Feher, after the fold...)

Snack Pack Key Chains

From Monkey Design, available in Taiwan, but discontinued in the USA: snack pack key chains.

“Everyone has their favorite junk food. In Taiwan, they like to carry miniature reminders of their snacks on a keychain. (Also available on a lanyard for cell phone usage!)”

–Monkey Design USA

(Some close up photos after the fold...)

8 Glass Bottle Houses

In addition to bottle-shaped roadside attractions, there are also a large number of buildings actually made out of bottles. Employing “bottle wall construction,” many have sought to build homes with bottles instead of bricks.

The use of empty vessels in construction dates back at least to ancient Rome, where many structures used empty amphorae embedded in concrete. This was not done for aesthetic reasons, but to lighten the load of upper levels of structures, and also to reduce concrete usage. This technique was used for example in the Circus of Maxentius.

Wikipedia entry: Bottle Houses Throughout History

In (relatively) more recent times, there have been a variety of motivations for using bottles instead of bricks. These structures run the gamut from cabins built in the early 1900s (in areas like death valley where empty bottles were more plentiful than lumber)—to eccentric homemade “follies” (often evolving into roadside attractions, in their own right.)

Sometimes the structures actually rely on the bottles for cumulative strength. Other times the bottles are used as a culturally-charged, decorative element. (Also: when colored bottles are used to build transparent walls, it creates a kind of poor man’s stained glass.)

There are too many brands of bottle houses to list them all, but here are eight:

1. The Rhyolite Bottle House

The Rhyolite bottle house in Death Valley. (archival photo from 1926, The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley)

Built around 1905—restored once in 1925—preserved and somewhat restored from 1954-1969 and then restored again in 2005.

“Bottles were free and many of them. Other building materials were scarce. There were about 30 or more Saloons in Rhyolite”

Death Valley automobile trip, 1926

(Lots more glass bottle house photos, after the fold...)

Vervacious

Clockwise from left: Vervacious 2008 Signature Stack, Wasabi Ginger Mignonette, and White Truffle Apricot Mostarda. All pictures courtesy of the Vervacious website.

I went to Cardullo's in Harvard Square over the weekend. It's a store with row upon row of gourmet food (tea, coffee, honey, chocolate, wine, spices, candy), much of it imported, and is thus a wonderland of awesome packaging. I wandered up and down the tightly stocked aisles, drooling alternately at the food and at the stuff containing the food.

When I saw these Vervacious spices, teas, and sauces in the corner, I uttered a rather embarrassing squeal of delight. These beautifully crafted little glass jars are curved and structured so that they stack on top of one another to form a wavy glass tower.  It transforms an assortment of teas/spices/sauces/cocoa into a mini sculpture. 

Sideways Bottle House

Photos by Jannx of a bottle-shaped artwork on the Henry Hudson Greenway. (Roll over the photo to see the interior.)

Usually bottle-shaped, representational architecture is constructed upright. To see a horizontal, ship-in-a-bottle-style bottle house is unusual. (The interior sort of reminds me of an RV.)

Artwork is by Malcolm Cochran and entitled “Private Passage.” According to the  Hudson River Park website:

Private Passage is a distinctive sculpture consisting of a 30' x 8'6" wine bottle resting on its side, within which is a representation of an interior stateroom from the ocean liner, Queen Mary.

More nice photos: here.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Bilingual Vimto Can (w/bottle)

On left: my Vimto can; on far right: a photo from Edner Robles’ Flickr Photostream

I found my bilingual Vimto can whilst walking the dog on Bay Street. English/French, but with some prominent Arabic writing, as well.

I like its cross-referential¹ bottle illustration. (The bottle contains the concentrated “cordial” version which one then dilutes, while the can contains the premixed, ready-to-drink version of the beverage.)

It contains the juice of grapes, raspberries and blackcurrants (in a 3% concentration), flavoured with herbs and spices...

It is currently made by Vimto Soft Drinks, a division of Nichols plc. It has acquired cult status amongst its consumers and celebrates its 100 year anniversary in 2008. Vimto is also manufactured under licence in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It's also considered to be the most popular drink during the holy month of Ramadan.

from the Vimto Wikipedia entry

Created as a health tonic in 1908 by John Noel Nichols, a Manchester-based wholesaler of spices and medicines. “Vimto” is a shortened version of its original name: Vim Tonic. Nichols launched his soft drink in an effort to cash in on the British temperance movement.

(More Vimto packaging, after the fold...)