Feature
The New Plat du Jour: Leftovers
RECYCLING, THE PROCESS OF PUTTING waste materials to new uses, has been a common practice for most of human history; Plato advocated it way back in 400 BC. But it became a central and urgent concern in the modern world in the late 1960s and ’70s because of the massive amounts of waste that industrial economies were producing. Soon, just recycling wasn’t sufficient. In the 1990s William McDonough and Michael Braungart began preaching the doctrine of cradle to cradle. It wasn’t enough to reuse; they proposed a closed loop, creating products that may be continually reused and recycled. Today, that concept has morphed into the now-popular circular economy, a business philosophy that aims to move industry from a take-make-dispose model to one where materials are continuously repurposed. New technology has been essential. But designers from around the world have seized the moment and are taking the concept into new territories.
Sticking to Basics
Stickbulb, cofounded in 2012 by Russell Greenberg and Christopher Beardsley of design office RUX, creates light fixtures using reclaimed wood from Atlantic City boardwalks, old water towers, and elsewhere, as well as from left-overs and offcuts of previous works created in RUX’s New York–based studio. It produces only designs that can be manufactured locally and affordably within a five-mile radius of their New York City office. Scraps of maple, walnut, and other woods are paired with LEDs and transformed into light fixtures. The wooden beams come in one- to six-foot lengths and are designed to plug into and out of various steel hardware connectors without tools. The collection was designed with the fewest number of parts possible and with connections that make the pieces easy to separate for maintenance, recycling, or reuse.
stickbulb.com
Stickbulb’s Ambassador light sculpture installation at Collective Design in New York, 2017, constructed from redwood reclaimed from NYC water towers on a mirrored base. Courtesy Stickbulb
