There’s this place where I live called “Jimmy’s Food Store” and it is, as you might expect, a store where food is sold.  But oh what food it is!  Italian comestibles dripping with Italian deliciousness, sold with Italian gusto to Italians and non-Italians alike.  At Jimmy’s Food Store you can get an Italian meatball sandwich that will bring tears to your eyes. You will literally be crying as you eat it because it is so tasty, and you’ll be crying after you’ve eaten it because you’ll be so sad it’s gone.  I just started crying quietly at my desk just because I am thinking about it, actually.

If there is a drawback to Jimmy’s meatball sandwich (and please note that when I say drawback this is like pointing out that Miss Universe had on one too many fake eyelashes at the last pageant) it is that you receive it in a Styrofoam container.  I remember learning that it takes something like nine billion years and a thermonuclear explosion for Styrofoam to break down and return to Earth, and that even as it does so it is poisoning things and wreaking havoc and stealing your purse at gunpoint. It is bad stuff.  And even if you accept the fact that it has some good points (is a cheap insulating material that basically lasts forever) the Styrofoam containers at Jimmy’s are evil because they MAKE THE SANDWICH A LITTLE BIT SOGGY IF YOU DON’T OPEN IT RIGHT AWAY.

Image courtesy ecolect.net

I starting thinking about this while eating lunch at Jimmy’s last week because I had come across information about PaperFoam, which is an injection-molded cellulose fiber-based packaging material.  Paper foam is itself made from recycled paper, and its properties are similar to thin Styrofoam or pulp in packaging applications.  According to Ecolect, “the product is extremely lightweight which lowers the transportation costs, and consumers can discard [it] with paper recycling or in the trash as it easily biodegrades…  PaperFoam CD packaging, for example, has an 85% lower carbon footprint compared to traditional, plastic jewel-case CD packaging.”  The product is produced in the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States and Malaysia.

So I am thinking that Jimmy’s needs to develop a PaperFoam extra special vented meatball sandwich container. It would be biodegradable, prevent the sandwich from getting soggy, and keep it warm at the same time due to its insulating properties.  And for those of you wondering how this is relevant to architecture – you can’t build anything on an empty stomach!

WU XING

I have filed this material under WOOD because it is made of tree fibers.

Cited:

“Check Out Paper Foam, an Amazing Material!” Ecolect.net. Accessed 10/5/11. URL.

Images courtesy Studio Conover

You’ll be happy to know that in San Diego, California, a ray of hope shines like a beacon up from the inky dark hole of architectural product literature.  Said ray of hope is Studio Conover, “a cross-disciplinary company focusing on architectural consultation, materials specification and product design for the built environment. [They] specialize in exterior colorways and materials specification consultation with architects, builders and developers,” according to David Conover, the eponymous owner of the studio.  Really, they’ve got a great idea.  Information about a product that is organized, accurate, and communicated in a clear and aesthetically pleasing manner attracts architects like honey attracts bears, which makes it more likely that they will specify a certain product or material (the architects, not the bears).

The studio also happens to put out a fantabulous blog called Contexture that is full of useful information (some of which I am currently reviewing as I try to fix all the Internet Explorer CSS bugs I’ve managed to incorporate into this website in the past few days).  The name for the blog is a mashup of the words Conover and Texture, which is an appropriate connotation, given that:

“Much of our process involves working texture within and throughout the context of the particular job at hand. Whether we’re selecting a specific brick shape, color and installation pattern for a residential community, referencing an archaic woodtype letterform or contemplating the coarseness of cement or paper, texture remains a predominant underlying component simply because it is so representative of the products and projects we work on.”

Hopefully, people who make the stuff we use to construct buildings will use the people who design the stuff that explains what people make to help the people who design the buildings, and everyone will be better off!

*I’ve been meaning to write a post about plastic grass for ages, but since lawns in general are a hot button issue for me, I’m afraid it’s just going to be a massive rant.  I guess this post started out as a rant too – sorry.

I’m completely obsessed with thermochromatic ink.  I’m obsessed with ink in general, ever since my undergraduate days in the print shop in Walsh.  But I am especially obsessed with thermochromatic ink – and not just because it’s how I know whether my beer is cold enough.  Thermochromatic ink changes color when the temperature drops above or below a specific threshold.  I found this lovely and slightly dense explanation of how this happens while I was looking at Chromazone Thermostar Ink the other day:

“ChromaZone is a microencapsulated thermochromic pigment which changes from colour to colourless as the temperature rises. With decreasing temperature the colour returns. The pigment is encapsulated in aqueous conditions and the resultant pigment is in slurry form….  Due to their chemical and physical properties the visible colour change of ChromaZone pigments occurs over a temperature range of approximately 5ºC and additionally shows a thermal hysteresis. This means that the colour starts disappearing before reaching the relevant response temperature and at the ensuing temperature decrease requires a significantly lower temperature to regain full colour strength.”

Image courtesy chromazone.co/uk

Hopefully that explanation did not produce a cerebral hysterisis, and we are all ready to move on to an interesting application for thermochromatic inks: wallpaper!

Image courtesy nextnature.com

Designer Josien Pieters used thermochromatic ink to create a prototype of a dynamic wallpaper for a project called Between You, Me, and the Wall that explores the potential of ambient information decoration.  The wallpaper allows people to get a general sense of how busy they are during the week by gazing at the abstract pattern of triangles that appear.  Within the pattern, every yellow shape represents an hour of the week.  Dark purple elements change color to a sort of lighter purple-blue when there is something scheduled (Source: Mensvoort).  The change in color is produced by heating pads that sit between the ink-coated paper and the wall.  These are activated by a “phidget interface kit” that connects the heating pads to a laptop, so that the data from a Microsoft Outlook calendar generates the pattern and it can be updated at any time (Pieters, 36).  I’m not sure what a phidget interface kit is exactly, but I want one.

Image courtesy nextnature.com

Artist Shi Yuan has also created a prototype thermochromatic wall paper, based on heat sensitivity technology and meant delight the the viewer.

Image courtesy techpin.com

The paper displays a flower in 3 phases.  When the temperature reaches a certain limit, the flower begins to bloom.  When the temperature gets a little hotter, the flowers bloom uproariously (Source: Techpin).  I’m not sure if this project protoype was actually produced or if it was merely rendered, but I very much like the idea of a spot of springtime near the heater in winter.

Image courtesy techpin.com

WU XING:

I wasn’t sure whether thermochromatic ink would fall under water, because ink is fluid and thin and can take on different forms – or if it would be better categorized as a fire material because of the color change that happens with heat.  But then I remembered that I can do whatever I want and I put it in both categories.  HA!

PS – I am planning to try to get some of this ink and work with it – I have an idea.  Check out the lab to see some of my crazy experiments…

Cited:

Chromazone

B., Sierra Monica. “Thermochromic.”  Techpin.com 05/26/08.  Accessed 01/26/10. URL.

Mensvoort, Koert van. “Agenda Wallpaper.” NextNature.com 01/26/09.  Accessed 01/26/10. URL.