Monday 24 October 2011

Microbial Home


Yanko Design (The DREADCO of the design world) rolls out another of its world-beater ideas with the Microbial Home.  Unlike the usual Yanko line, which usually consists of one-offs of oddity, this one is an entire suite.  More like usually, it is "green", which means that they were so fixated on the concept that they never bothered to consider such minor factors as practicality or feasibility.  Their motto: Why bother to reach for the slide rule when you're too busy Saving the PlanetTM while looking chic.

Billed as "a cyclical biological machine where wastes like sewage, effluent, garbage, wastewater are filtered, processed and recycled to be used as inputs for the various home functions", the Microbial Home boasts a neat set of prep island and larder/dining room table where the former takes your kitchen scraps and digests them into methane (the "good" Gaia worshipping kind) and the latter, which boasts terracotta evaporation cooling pots that keep your food "alive" rather than "dead" like in your fridge.  How is never explained.  But what both bits of the ensemble have in common is that they are much too small for their tasks and will almost certainly stink of rotten eggs inside a week.  Just the thing to complement your trendy loft flat.


But my personal favourite is the Urban Beehive, which is supposed to allow you to keep bees in the centre of a busy metropolis.  This isn't that daft an idea.  In fact, there are quite a few bee keepers in places like New York and London, but they restrict themselves to traditional hives on rooftops.  I don't know what they'd think of this fragile glass egg thing that ignores the practical reasons why an apiary is the shape it is and that apparently requires having a custom hole cut in your picture window to mount the heavy object.  Don't think about either shattering.  It's a toss up whether they'd be more perplexed by a) how do you get inside the thing to harvest and clean, b) why there isn't a proper landing platform for the bees, c) how you are supposed to water the flower pot when it's four stories up with no way to reach it from the inside or d) what the blazes that little string is for.

2 comments:

eon said...

It's for a pretty girl to pull on, thereby distracting the (probably metrosexual) male would-be buyers from how daft the entire idea is?

cheers

eon

Sergej said...

Hmm, 100 years ago it was considered a sign of modernity that we didn't um,... process our methane generating waste, right next to where we ate. Before that, a method for conducting same away from a city was a sign of a civilization at its peak. Who knew that so many people were so wrong, for such a long time?

As for the smell, consider the folks at Occupy Your Trust Fund. They're used to it.