Tag Archives: sustainable design

Kinari Might Be the Most Important Material You’ve Never Heard Of

Posted on by

Plastic has a PR problem, and it has for years. We know it. Brands know it. And yet, the stuff is everywhere, because for all its environmental baggage, petroleum-based plastic is cheap, durable, and remarkably easy to manufacture at scale. Finding a material that can honestly compete with it has been one of the quieter design challenges of the last decade. Kinari, developed by Panasonic’s MI Division, is making a compelling case that the answer was growing in the ground the whole time.

Kinari is a cellulose-based composite resin made primarily from plant fibers. Not a novelty material reserved for concept art and trade show booths, but a functional, moldable, colorable material designed for home appliance casings, building materials, and automotive components. It currently contains up to 85% cellulose fibers, and the team has been steadily pushing that number upward since work began in 2015. Back in 2019, the formulation sat at 55% biomass. By 2022, it had reached 90%. The goal, eventually, is 100%. That trajectory tells you something. This isn’t a splashy announcement material cooked up for a sustainability report. It’s a slow, deliberate material science project with a very clear destination, and that kind of patience is rare in an industry that tends to reward the bold launch over the quiet improvement.

Designer: MI Division of Panasonic Holdings Corporation

The products already made from kinari help tell the story better than any specification sheet could. There are spoons in matte black and deep forest greens that look like something between resin and lacquered wood. Bowls in warm terracotta tones that sit naturally alongside ceramics without trying to impersonate them. A tumbler with the kind of rich, grain-like surface you’d expect from a hand-turned wooden cup. A soap dispenser pump in honeyed amber. Pendant lamps with a softly mottled, stone-like finish. These aren’t prototypes staged for press photos. They’re finished objects that feel considered, tactile, and genuinely desirable, which is not something you often say about sustainable alternatives to plastic.

That’s the part that matters most, beyond the environmental credentials. Kinari doesn’t ask you to compromise on aesthetics to feel good about your choices. The material carries a warmth that conventional plastic simply can’t replicate, and the range of colors and finishes it’s capable of makes it versatile enough to work across product categories without looking like it’s trying too hard to be natural.

Beyond the plant-based headline, kinari’s most compelling quality is how practical it’s designed to be for manufacturers. One of the most persistent criticisms of sustainable alternatives is that they demand too much: new equipment, new processes, new supply chains. Kinari sidesteps all of that. Manufacturers can switch to it without investing in new machinery, because it behaves like conventional plastic during production. The most elegant sustainable solution is always the one that removes friction rather than adding it.

The production process adds to the case. Kinari uses an all-dry manufacturing method, eliminating water entirely, which significantly reduces energy consumption and CO₂ emissions compared to conventional plastic manufacturing. Petroleum use drops by 55 to 70 percent depending on the formulation. These aren’t rounding-error improvements. They represent a meaningful shift in how much environmental cost gets built into a material before it even becomes a product.

The end-of-life story is equally worth attention, even if it’s harder to photograph and harder to market. The team is developing a two-pronged recycling approach aimed at creating a genuinely closed-loop system. A material that can be recovered, processed, and remade is categorically different from one that just gets discarded in a slightly less guilty way. Circularity is easy to put in a brand statement. Building it into the actual material science is another thing entirely.

The honest question with any sustainable material is whether it can scale without losing what makes it worth scaling. That’s still being answered. But Panasonic has been working on kinari quietly and methodically since 2015, improving the biomass content year over year, and that level of sustained commitment sets it apart from the concept-stage bioplastics we’ve seen come and go.

Design moves fast. Materials take longer. Kinari is proof that the most consequential innovation isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s the one that’s been in the lab for a decade, getting a little better every year, waiting for the world to finally catch up.

The post Kinari Might Be the Most Important Material You’ve Never Heard Of first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right

Posted on by


Sustainable design has a branding problem. Not an ethics problem, not a materials problem, but a branding problem. For years, the conversation around circular materials and responsible production has been wrapped in language that feels like a lecture. Worthy, yes. Exciting, rarely. So when a stool shows up at Alcova during Milan Design Week looking like a bouquet of pompoms crowning a cluster of dreamy pastel cylinders, it stops you mid-stride. That stool is the Alice Stool by Studio LoopLoop, and it’s making a very quiet but very pointed argument.

Founded in 2022 by Odin Visser and Charles Gateau, Studio LoopLoop is a Dutch practice that operates somewhere between science lab and design studio. Their approach is hands-on and deliberately self-sufficient, developing their own processes rather than outsourcing to industrial systems they’d rather move away from. For Alice, that methodology produced something that looks almost nothing like what we typically picture when someone says “sustainable furniture.”

Designer: Studio LoopLoop

The base of the stool is made from 100% recycled aluminium, specifically Hydro 100R extrusions, and coloured using a plant-based anodising technique the studio developed in-house. The result is a range of subtle colour gradients that shift from soft sage to deep plum to warm yellow, achieved through controlled dyeing rather than chemical baths heavy with petrochemical inputs. The seat is upholstered with Savian by Bio-Fluff, a plant-based faux fur hand-dyed with NIG natural pigments. The combination is tactile in a way that feels almost irrational for a piece of furniture. You want to touch it. You probably want to sit on it and not get up.

And that’s exactly the point. Studio LoopLoop titled their Alcova presentation “Alice Atomicus,” a nod to both Lewis Carroll’s dreamlike world and the idea of material elements rearranged into something new and entirely unexpected. Sustainability, they’re saying, doesn’t have to arrive in a brown paper wrapper with a guilt trip attached. It can be playful. It can be seductive. It can be soft and sculptural and genuinely desirable.

I think this matters more than it might seem. The design industry has spent years making the case that circular materials can be high-quality, and that case has largely been won. But the emotional argument is trickier. If sustainable design feels like an obligation rather than a pleasure, it will always occupy a niche, admired from a distance but rarely chosen with enthusiasm. The Alice Stool feels like a genuine attempt to close that gap, to make the responsible choice the one you actually want because it’s beautiful, not just because it’s correct.

The use of Savian is worth pausing on. Bio-Fluff’s plant-based fur made its breakthrough in fashion through collaborations with Collina Strada, Martine Rose, and Louis Vuitton, finding a foothold in a luxury market that was already starting to rethink its relationship with animal materials. Moving into furniture feels like a natural extension, and the Alice Stool is one of the clearest demonstrations of Savian’s material potential outside of a clothing rack. Against cool metal cylinders, the fur reads as something almost otherworldly. It’s plush in a way that synthetic faux fur typically isn’t, and the hand-dyed variation in the seat means no two stools look exactly alike.

That detail matters to me personally. Mass production has its place, but there’s a real cultural hunger right now for objects that carry the trace of human hands. The Alice Stool has that quality in abundance. The graduated aluminium tones, the slight unpredictability of natural dye, the tactile generosity of the seat, together they suggest something made with attention rather than efficiency as the primary value.

Studio LoopLoop is a young studio, only four years old, but they’re working with a clarity of vision that feels well ahead of their timeline. The Alice Stool isn’t a concept piece hedged with caveats. It’s a fully formed object that asks a simple question: why should doing the right thing look boring? The answer, apparently, is that it doesn’t have to.

The post Pompom Stool Made From Recycled Aluminum Is Green Design Done Right first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Lamp Is Cast From Soda Can Trash But Looks Like Carved Stone

Posted on by

Upcycled materials have become a familiar part of sustainable design, but most of them still try to hide where they came from. The aluminum gets purified, the recycled plastic molded smooth, and the result looks clean and neutral but loses the story of its origins. Pairing genuine sustainability with aesthetic character turns out to be a harder problem than it looks, and most attempts quietly sidestep it.

Tokyo-based product designer Kenji Abe took a different approach with Aperire, a lighting fixture cast entirely from discarded aluminum cans. Rather than refining the material beyond recognition, he deliberately left in the impurities. The wrinkles, air bubbles, and traces of ink from the original cans were preserved as surface texture, turning what most casting processes would filter out into the fixture’s defining character.

Designer: Kenji Abe

Melting the cans down without removing too many impurities is what produces that surface. Each piece ends up slightly different, carrying unpredictable marks that no two castings will ever replicate. Traces of ink from labels and other irregularities seep through the metal, and the result reads less like manufactured aluminum and more like weathered stone or bone. The artificial origin becomes genuinely difficult to place.

The finish that results reads almost like a natural material. The same surface might show shallow depressions, irregular ridges, or fine lines that look nothing like machined metal. Paired with the organic, chambered form, it makes Aperire genuinely hard to identify on first glance. The cans are unmistakably present in the material’s history, but they aren’t visible in what the object has become.

The shape itself draws from an equally unexpected source: foraminifera, the microscopic marine organisms whose skeletons are riddled with tiny holes and chambers. Combined with the rough appearance of eroded rock, the form was built through the deliberate addition and subtraction of geometric shapes. Light reflects inside the hollow interior and finds its way out through the openings, seeping gently outward rather than projecting.

The name carries a few threads that converge on the same idea. Aperire is Latin for “to open,” connecting to aperture, the camera mechanism that controls how much light passes through. It also traces back to April, the season when flowers open. For a fixture that lets light slowly leak outward rather than announce itself, the name seems less like branding than an accurate description of what the object does.

The fixture doesn’t make a loud case for sustainability as a concept; it just happens to be made from something that would otherwise be discarded, and it shows it. That quiet honesty gives it a credibility that purpose-built eco-aesthetic objects rarely manage. The cans stop being waste, stop being raw material, and become something that earns its place on a table or shelf without the sustainability narrative doing the heavy lifting. The object handles that part itself.

The post This Lamp Is Cast From Soda Can Trash But Looks Like Carved Stone first appeared on Yanko Design.

What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good?

Posted on by

Public art has long served as a cultural mirror, reflecting what a society chooses to honor. As climate change intensifies and cities face mounting pressure to decarbonize, questions about what our monuments should stand for are getting harder to ignore. Most renewable energy infrastructure stays invisible, buried in utility corridors or mounted on rooftops, rarely acknowledged as something worth celebrating in public spaces.

Santa Fe-based artist Michael Jantzen has spent years addressing exactly that through his Public Eco-Art Proposals. The series imagines a different kind of monument, one that doesn’t merely symbolize sustainability but actively practices it. Each proposal takes the form of a sculpture or pavilion that generates electricity from the sun or wind, collects rainwater, stores energy in batteries, and sometimes sends power into the local grid.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Jantzen gives his work an aesthetic freedom that most utility-driven designs don’t have. Rather than concealing the mechanics, he treats solar panels, wind turbines, and structural frameworks as sculptural elements in their own right. The visual language is deliberately technological and mechanical, blurring the line between a functional energy structure and art worth stopping for.

Walk through one of these proposed spaces, and you might find yourself beneath a pavilion whose curved solar canopy quietly feeds electricity back to the neighborhood. Or stop to look at a series of angular sculptures lined up across a park, their solar-panel tops tracking the light. What looks like a meditation on shape and form turns out to be a modest power station doing actual work.

The proposals span a wide range of environments. Some are designed for open fields or public parks, while others imagine coastal settings with floating platforms supporting wind and water energy structures. A chevron-shaped sculpture with a solar panel at its angular peak stands in what appears to be a university courtyard. Another piece holds solar panels above cylindrical battery storage pods, blending the practical business of energy collection with an unexpectedly considered form.

This approach also reframes the relationship between art and urban infrastructure. Municipalities already commission sculptures for parks and plazas; so why shouldn’t those commissions do more? A solar-powered gathering space generates electricity, makes clean technology approachable, and sparks conversations among the millions of people who walk through it, most of whom would otherwise never engage with energy infrastructure at all.

Jantzen’s vision extends beyond any single installation. He imagines these structures placed in cities and parks worldwide, shifting how communities relate to the energy they consume by making that relationship visible and beautiful. For him, celebrating sustainability means building things worth caring about, giving clean energy a presence that people can gather around, the way they’ve always done with the landmarks that define a place.

The post What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good? first appeared on Yanko Design.

This €235 Rippling Stone Valet Tray Has a Candle Holder Built In

Posted on by

Most entryway surfaces tell a familiar story, and it’s rarely a flattering one. Keys get tossed wherever there’s space, coins scatter to the edges, and a watch ends up next to a forgotten receipt by morning. The valet tray was supposed to solve this, but most of them look clinical, forgettable, or like they belong in a hotel room rather than a thoughtfully arranged home.

The Delicato Tray takes a different approach, and the solution comes from a direction you might not expect: ripples. Sold through Oftwise, it merges a valet tray and a candle holder into a single disc-shaped object cast from Jesmonite AC730, a sustainable stone composite. The result reads less like a utilitarian catchall and more like something a sculptor quietly left on your nightstand.

Designer: Joao Teixeira for Oftwise

The ripple pattern isn’t purely decorative. The concentric waves are asymmetrical, with the outer rings wider at the front for bulkier items like keys or glasses, and the inner curves sitting closer toward the back for smaller things like rings or coins. It’s a hierarchy built into the shape itself, making organization almost unconscious rather than something you have to think about.

At the center of those ripples sits a recessed pocket sized for a tealight candle, turning the tray into a mood-setter as much as a catchall. Lighting a candle while dropping your watch and keys into the right grooves transforms a mundane habit into something closer to a ritual. It’s a lot to ask of a disc of stone, but Delicato manages it without breaking a sweat.

The material is what makes that balance possible. Jesmonite AC730 is a water-based, VOC-free stone composite that reproduces the look and texture of natural stone without concrete’s weight. It’s independently fire-rated and impact-resistant, which matters for something that routinely sits next to an open flame. A matte acrylic sealer and a cork anti-slip pad on the base round out the practical details.

Because the tray is hand-cast, no two are identical. Small air bubbles, subtle texture variations, and minor color shifts are natural byproducts of the process, and Oftwise is upfront about that. The available color, Bath Stone, is a warm sandy beige neutral enough for almost any interior. At 2kg, it has a quiet weight that makes a surface look deliberately arranged.

The Delicato Tray measures 24.5cm x 24.5cm with a height of just 2.8cm, low enough to sit under a bedside lamp without stealing vertical space. The candle pocket measures 3.9cm across and 1.5cm deep, a snug fit for a standard tealight. It retails for €235 on Oftwise, which places it firmly in the premium tier for an object of this category.

What Delicato gets right is something many design objects miss: it doesn’t try too hard to be either thing. It’s not decorative at the expense of being useful, and it’s not useful at the expense of looking good. A tray that doubles as a candle holder and a sculptural object sounds like a confused brief, but the ripple form settles all of that quietly.

The post This €235 Rippling Stone Valet Tray Has a Candle Holder Built In first appeared on Yanko Design.

IDOM’s 42-Meter Steel Buoy Just Proved Wave Energy Can Actually Work

Posted on by

Off the rugged coast of Bilbao, quietly bobbing in the Bay of Biscay, is a 42-meter steel buoy most people have never heard of. It has no viral launch campaign, no sleek consumer interface, and no celebrity endorsement attached to it. But the MARMOK-A-5, designed by Spanish engineering firm IDOM, just did something that deserves far more attention than it’s getting. It may be one of the more quietly significant design stories of the year.

In May 2026, an updated version of the MARMOK-A-5 was successfully deployed at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP), off the coast of Bilbao, as part of the EuropeWave Pre-Commercial Procurement program. IDOM is one of three finalists competing for a share of a €13.4 million budget to develop and test next-generation wave energy technology. And unlike a lot of clean energy news that tends to stay in the realm of promises and projections, this one is already in the water, already connected to the grid, and already generating real-world data.

Designer: IDOM

The MARMOK-A-5 is a wave energy converter, and it works on a principle that’s almost elegant in its simplicity. The main structure is a floating spar buoy, 5 meters in diameter and weighing 162 tons. Inside it sits a cylindrical water column. As ocean waves pass through, the water inside rises and falls like a piston. That motion compresses and expands an air chamber at the top of the buoy, and the resulting rush of air spins a turbine. That turbine generates electricity, which travels to shore through a subsea cable. No burning, no drilling, no fuel. Just water moving the way it always has.

The technology has been in development for years. IDOM first deployed the original MARMOK-A-5 at BiMEP back in 2016, making it the first wave energy converter ever connected to the Spanish state electricity grid. That alone was historic. The version now in the water is significantly upgraded, featuring a newly developed power take-off system, controllable turbine blades, onboard batteries, and intelligent control systems built to optimize performance in real, unpredictable high-seas conditions.

What strikes me about this project is how deliberately it was built. Every iteration, every sea campaign, fed into a deeper understanding of how ocean energy behaves at scale. IDOM didn’t rush to market. They observed, adjusted, and came back smarter. The redesigned system focuses on improving power performance while keeping the one quality that sea deployments demand above all else: reliability. A beautiful machine that can’t survive the North Atlantic is just expensive wreckage.

Among the milestones from this latest deployment, one is worth calling out: the MARMOK-A-5 is now the first WEC to connect electrically to the grid through the HarshLab buoy at BiMEP. It sounds like a technical footnote, but it’s a meaningful shift in how ocean energy infrastructure can be tested and eventually scaled. The ability to gather live, grid-connected data from a genuinely harsh marine environment is exactly the kind of proof point that moves wave energy from “promising concept” to “serious contender.”

Wave energy has long sat in the shadow of wind and solar. It’s messier to engineer, harder to deploy, and slower to scale. But it has one clear advantage that doesn’t get discussed enough: oceans are predictable. Waves don’t stop at night and don’t pause on cloudy days, and the world’s coastlines happen to overlap heavily with its most energy-hungry regions. The ocean covers more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface, and most of that constant motion still goes completely untapped. The MARMOK-A-5 is still a prototype, rated at just 30 kilowatts. But prototypes are how industries start.

I keep thinking about how much of what will eventually power our lives is currently sitting, mostly unnoticed, off some coast. Not announced with a keynote. Not trending. Just quietly working, enduring salt and storm, sending electricity down a cable while the rest of us scroll past. The MARMOK-A-5 might be one of the least glamorous objects in clean energy right now. But it might also be one of the most important.

The post IDOM’s 42-Meter Steel Buoy Just Proved Wave Energy Can Actually Work first appeared on Yanko Design.

A 3D-Printed Lamp That Finally Makes Sustainability Look Great

Posted on by

Most lamps do one thing. They sit on your desk, light your space, and get buried under the slow-moving chaos of charger cables and forgotten receipts. The Drop Light by Teixeira Design Studio doesn’t just resist that fate; it anticipates it.

The lamp is 3D printed entirely from recycled, plant-based PLA, designed in collaboration with Oftwise Studio. It’s a desk lamp with a built-in tray at the base that holds the usual suspects: pen drives, earphones, that one charging cable you’re always looking for. The storage isn’t an afterthought bolted onto a design that already existed. It’s baked into the silhouette from the start, which is a distinction I wish more designers paid attention to.

Designer: Teixeira Design Studio

What makes the Drop Light genuinely interesting isn’t just the function-forward thinking, although that’s a big part of it. It’s the way the material actually drives the design. The base and top tray carry a fuzzy, matte PLA texture that’s scratch-resistant and tactile, almost soft to look at. The shade is printed smooth and semi-translucent, scattering light evenly without showing you the bulb. Two completely different surface behaviors, one material, one object.

That contrast between matte and diffuse isn’t just visual. It communicates function before you even plug anything in. You know instinctively where to rest your things and where the light comes from, and nothing about that has to be labeled or explained. Good design, in my opinion, should always work like that. The object tells you what it needs from you before you ask.

I’ve seen a lot of “sustainable” product design that feels more like an excuse than a commitment. Recycled materials get used in ways that look recycled. Rough edges, uneven finishes, a vague suggestion that the environmental good will outweigh the aesthetic compromise. Drop Light doesn’t do that. The layered build lines from the printing process are barely visible under the fuzzy texture, reading as intentional surface detail rather than manufacturing artifact. It looks fabricated, deliberate, finished. The plant-based PLA carries a warmth that petroleum-based plastics simply don’t, and the design leans into that warmth rather than trying to disguise it.

This is also where 3D printing, as a production method, starts to become genuinely exciting for everyday objects. For a long time, additive manufacturing lived almost entirely in the prototyping world. You used it to test a form before committing to injection molding. Drop Light is part of a growing wave of products that treat 3D printing as the final destination, not a stepping stone to something else. The result is a lamp that looks like it was designed to be made this way, not like it was designed for a factory and then adapted.

Teixeira Design Studio has done this kind of work before. Their Fold luminaire, also 3D printed, tackled the challenge of combining task and mood lighting into a single form. The studio seems genuinely interested in what the process makes possible, rather than just using it for the sustainability talking points. That consistency matters. It’s the difference between a design practice and a design trend.

Is Drop Light for everyone? Probably not. Minimalist in its silhouette, muted in its palette, it rewards people who appreciate restraint. If you’re someone who wants your lamp to announce itself, this isn’t it. But if you’re drawn to objects that feel considered, that do more than one thing without trying to look like they do, the Drop Light hits a note that a lot of current lighting design misses completely.

We talk a lot about what sustainable design could be, and not nearly enough about what it actually looks like when it works. This lamp is a solid answer to that question. Not a perfect one, but a convincing one, and sometimes that’s exactly what the conversation needs.

The post A 3D-Printed Lamp That Finally Makes Sustainability Look Great first appeared on Yanko Design.

This €265 Aluminum Table Was Designed Backward to Waste Just 4%

Posted on by

Furniture manufacturing has a quiet waste problem that rarely makes it into the marketing copy. Most pieces require significantly more raw material than what ends up in the finished product, with offcuts, excess, and scraps treated as an acceptable cost of doing business. Some studios have started designing around this inefficiency, treating material constraints not as a limitation but as a creative starting point.

Germany-based Momentum Studio took exactly that approach with its 06 Side Table. Rather than designing a form and then figuring out how to cut it from aluminum, the studio worked the problem in reverse, focusing on how to extract a meaningful shape from a flat sheet with as little waste as possible. The result is a table that looks like it came from a sketch, not a spreadsheet.

Designer: Momentum Studio

The laser-cut parts were nested with enough precision to use 96% of the raw aluminum area, leaving just 4% as offcuts. That figure wasn’t incidental; it was a major focus during development. By designing the two flat panels to fit together as efficiently as possible, the studio kept material costs low enough to offer the piece at €265 while keeping the entire production strictly made in Germany.

What emerged from that constraint is a silhouette that could easily pass for something from the Bauhaus era. The outer body is formed from two rectangular panels with softly rounded corners, each carrying a large circular cutout that creates an opening through the structure. A circular shelf sits midway inside, and a round tabletop closes the form at the top. The geometry is simple but hard to reduce further.

The material is Aluminium AlMg3, hand-brushed and waxed for what Momentum Studio calls a raw finish. That deliberate restraint means the aluminum will develop a natural patina over time, something the studio frames not as a defect but as part of the piece’s evolving character. The screws are stainless steel, and the assembled table weighs 6.75kg at 47cm x 47cm x 47.5cm.

The table ships flat-packed and goes together without any tools in about five minutes. That’s a practical bonus for a piece that doesn’t look like it should be easy to put together. The lower circular shelf is sized well enough for a book, a small object, or whatever habitually ends up beside a reading chair or bed. The tabletop above handles whatever you’d normally want within arm’s reach.

The design commitment extends to its broader material philosophy, which the studio describes as selecting materials for their permanence rather than their convenience, aiming to create objects designed to age with dignity and outlast generations. It’s the kind of table that stays in a room for a long time, which seems to be exactly the point. For a piece built from raw, waxed aluminum, that ambition doesn’t seem far-fetched.

The post This €265 Aluminum Table Was Designed Backward to Waste Just 4% first appeared on Yanko Design.

Su Yang Choi Made a Glowing Lamp From Seaweed, Paprika, and Gardenia

Posted on by

Sustainable design has spent years negotiating an awkward identity crisis. The moment a material gets labeled biodegradable or plant-based, it tends to be filed under “eco-alternative,” which is shorthand for “almost as good as the real thing, but greener.” That framing puts the worth of the material almost entirely on what it replaces, rather than what it can become as something genuinely new.

Designer Su Yang Choi has been pushing back against that assumption with the Slow Project series, an ongoing investigation into seaweed-derived agar as a material with its own aesthetic voice. Slow2, the series’ second work, was presented at Salone Satellite 2026 in Milan as a pair of glowing tubular light installations that don’t quite look like anything industrial design or nature has produced before.

Designer: Su Yang Choi

The structural idea comes from baramgil, a spatial principle in traditional Korean hanok architecture where doors and windows line up along a single axis, letting the gaze pass through layered planes and create the impression of depth. Choi translates that logic into two vertically interlocking circular tubular structures, which build perceived depth through repetition and overlap rather than any physical expansion.

The tubes are built around a steel armature wrapped in layers of seaweed-derived agar, a biodegradable biopolymer Choi formulated independently without any synthetic additives. LED strips run through the core alongside insulating tubing, and the light passes outward through the semi-translucent material. The agar’s own surface texture, tight ridges spiraling along each curved section, reads as integral to the form rather than incidental.

Color comes entirely from natural pigments, specifically gardenia and paprika, which produce a gradient from warm amber and gold at the lower sections to a deeper red toward the top. The shift isn’t applied in flat bands but moves gradually across the form, and the LED light amplifies those variations differently through each layer of agar, so the coloration changes depending on where you look from.

Hung from the ceiling, the installation casts shadows on the wall behind it, the overlapping loops producing a secondary layer of visual information that extends the work beyond its physical boundaries. That doubling mirrors the baramgil idea at a different scale. Seen from the front, the structures read as a single unified form; shift to an angle and the depth between the interlocking sections opens up considerably.

What makes Slow2 compelling is what Choi is actually arguing through it. The Slow Project series isn’t about demonstrating what seaweed agar can replace; it’s an inquiry into whether the material can develop enough formal character to stand on its own. The baramgil reference, the natural pigments, the hand-wrapped tubes, none of it reads as sustainable messaging but as decisions the material itself invites. The concept, the form, and the substance aren’t three separate layers but one coherent thing, which is precisely where the Slow Project series seems to be heading.

The post Su Yang Choi Made a Glowing Lamp From Seaweed, Paprika, and Gardenia first appeared on Yanko Design.

Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying

Posted on by

There’s a version of a public building that checks all the sustainability boxes and still feels cold, institutional, and somehow indifferent to the people it’s meant to serve. The new Marpole Community Centre is not that building. Designed by Diamond Schmitt for the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, it’s nearing completion in Oak Park. It quietly resets expectations for what a civic facility can be.

The project replaces a well-loved but outgrown facility with a two-storey structure nearly double its size, measuring 5,000 square metres. The program is generous: a gymnasium, fitness centre, field house, multi-purpose rooms for seniors and youth, and a 74-space childcare facility. Underground parking is tucked beneath the building to protect the surrounding natural vegetation, letting Oak Park remain exactly that — a park.

Design: Diamond Schmitt

What makes the architecture worth paying attention to is the mass timber. Rather than limiting wood to the roof structure, as institutional buildings often do, the Marpole Community Centre uses a comprehensive mass timber frame — glulam columns and beams, a CLT floor system, and a long-span upper roof built from steel wide flange beams and a CLT deck. The result is a structure that reads as warm and considered, not engineered into submission. Exposed throughout the interior, the timber gives the building a human scale that concrete rarely allows.

The signature move is the gently curving roof. The doubly curved cantilever form, supported by long-span steel beams, required close coordination between the design team and contractors — but the payoff is an exterior that feels unified without being monotonous, and an interior where the ceiling becomes the experience. Strategic glazing pulls the landscape in, connecting occupants to Oak Park’s natural setting without sacrificing energy performance.

On the sustainability front, the numbers are serious. The building targets Passive House and LEED Gold certifications and has achieved a 41% reduction in embodied carbon. It’s also a pilot project for the City of Vancouver’s Embodied Carbon Guidelines, meaning lessons learned here will directly shape future civic buildings across the city. The project is also pursuing the CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building Design Standard.

Beyond the technical performance, the centre was designed with inclusion, equity, and Indigenous cultural representation as core principles — not afterthoughts bolted on at the end. For a neighbourhood as diverse as Marpole, that intentionality matters. A community centre tends to be the most democratic building a city can build. This one makes a strong case that it can also be among its most thoughtful.

The post Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying first appeared on Yanko Design.