The site WebUrbanist, a nice blog mainly focused on architecture and urban design, has prepared an interesting article about modern sink and wash basin designs.
As you can easily see, if you've always thought at sinks as white and round things more or less always with an identical shape, you're quite wrong then, because designers have worked much to style and innovate them. The following ones are my favourites:
This is the Ammonite Sink. As you can imagine from the name it has been inspired by those wonderful fossil shells:
The following three instead are serie called Kanera which surface resamble itself a liquid, the ceramic holds water like a seaside rock pool:
Like the prevoius also the third one is nature inspired. Erosion Sink is designed like a geographical map of a drainage basin with its contour lines.
Plugless Sink by designer Maja Ganszyniec is remarkable for its clever design that avoid tha useless water waste you usually have with a normal plugged basin (everybody keeps the water going until they've finished washing hands, tooth or whatever, this way instead, with no plug, you learn to fill the basin with water and use it until you've finished avoiding the waste of tens of unused litres of water down for the plug. Once you’ve finished with your bowl of collected water, tip it backwards into the spillway and you’re ready to go again.
Origin Sink is for sure the most Zen-inspired of the bunch. Lift the stone at the source of the river and the water starts its way down to the end of its journey, a plughole capped by another stone.:
The last one is in my opinion the less elegant and the most kitch by far but for sure it's absolutely original and weird. The Moody Aquarium Sink from Italbrass is infact a sink coupled with a fully-functional fishtank. The soap dishes on either side of the basin are entrances into the tank for feeding and maintenance.
Nationa Geographic/Jose Hernandez
Nature Honorable Mention
This is a shot of three eagles fighting over a fish in Homer, Alaska, from March 2008. You can see the fish at the top of the image flying by itself, but it was caught in its fall by another eagle.
Would you be able to catch in a single shot three eagles and a fish?
Jose Hernandez did it in this wonderful picture of an aerial "rough-and-tumble" which has gained an Honorable Mention in the Nature Section of the National Geographic International Photography Contest 2008.
This edition results have been just chosen from over 100,000 submissions.
This time there is no water-related winner (except the picture of the fishing eagles); However there's plenty of wonderful images, connected somehow with sea or water in the selections you can find in the official site. Do not lose the chance to visit it and enjoy hundreds of amazing images.
Here some of my favourites "wet" pictures:
Photo by Mohit Midha
Photo by Andrew Wong
Photo by Joshua Lambus
Jody MacDonald
Photo by Mukesh Srivastava
Photo by Sheri Mandel
Photo by Stephen Mayeux
photo by Randy Heisch
CLICK TO ENLARGE
This is a very imaginative advertising campaign, realized by Saatchi & Saatchi for Quicksilver blue-jeans line "Deep Blue".
Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Copenhagen, Denmark
Creative Director: Simon Wooller
Art Directors / Copywriters: Rasmus Petersen, Lasse Bækbo Hinke
Post Production: Morten Meldgaard, Utopia Design
CLICK TO ENLARGE
CLICK TO ENLARGE
If you are interested in fishes and other creatures of the deep (in their authentic appearance, without the fashionable jeansy style..) check this post:
Creatures from the Abyss
©Seawayblog
On 27th November 2007 I published the first post of this blog. It has been an exciting year, full of satisfactions, in which I've tried to share my amazement with you.
In this twelve months SeaWayBLOG has already changed a couple of times and new great changes are almost ready. I hope you all will keep on following me in this "aquatic" journey.
Swimming over New York it's possible!
This is a clever advertising from Ogilvy & Mather for HSBC. The advertising's goal is to raise awareness of the dangers of global warming, so an aerial photo of a city’s skyscrapers has been glued to the base of a swimming pool. The effect of swimming over a city should be awesome!
Nevertheless I have to say that the idea it's not new at all. As you can see in this previous ad campaign
Click to enlarge
The half empty/half full glass of water it's an old classic to explain the difference between optimistic and pessimistic perspectives. In this nice chart you can appreciate up to ten different points of views...
It's not the first time I post about really unconventional mean of transport to explore the waterworld and have fun in the sea, like the following examples:
Waterbird
Transparent Kayak
Squba
nevertheless I'm sure this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in this field. By far.
Innespace is the company that have invented this fantastic sort of moto-dolphin water vessel named SeaBreacher (there is also a single person version named simply Dolphin). This thing uses the same canopy as an F-22 fighter jet, keeping the roomy interior nice and dry inside a watertight seal and it's powered by a little engine in the back that allows you to do all sorts of fun stuff like barrel rolls, jumps, dives and drownings. "Swimming" just under the surface and than jumping outside just like a real dolphin! So Cool!
The best way to understand what SeaBreacher is able to do, however, is looking the following commercial:
SeaBreacher is for sale and if you buy one and you're not just sutisfied jumping alone in the sea there's also a racing league in which you can compete to show the world who's the best Dolphin on the scene!
ABC: David Reilly
Eleven pilot whales that survived a mass stranding in Tasmania that killed 53 others have been returned to the ocean thanks to a well-coordinated rescue effort, involving 60 volunteers and 15 government officers. The 64 dolphins were a pod of mother and calves. Satellite tracking devices had been placed on some of the whales and a reconnaissance plane would undertake a flight on Monday to check their progress.
ABC: David Reilly
Photo from AP Photo by Rachael Alderman
A trick that exploits the difference in temperature between seawater near the surface and deep down could supply the world with cheap green power
In this age in which we are trying to free ourselvels from the oil dependence the ocean have been studied many times as a tremendous and limitless potential energy reserve. Wave buoys or Tidal power are two different ways to draw this energy from the ocean but they are still far from being really effective but there is a third way, less acquainted by the public opinion but which is much closer to be effective and could really change the world of alternative energy: the OTEC, that stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion.
On the smallest scale this kind of technology is already installed and working, the actual challenge is to size it up in order to create huge plants able to produce up to 500 Mega Watts each one! The plants consits in floating offshore platforms sending electricity to onshore grids via submarine cables.
To understand how OTEC works look at the diagram below.
Warm surface water heats a fluid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia or a mixture of ammonia and water. When this "working fluid" boils, the resulting gas creates enough pressure to drive a turbine that generates power. The gas is then cooled by passing it through cold water pumped up from the ocean depths via massive fibreglass tubes, perhaps 1000 metres long and 27 metres in diameter, that suck up cold water at a rate of 1000 tonnes per second. While the gas condenses back into a liquid that can be used again, the water is returned to the deep ocean.
The challenge is to create those massive fibreglass tubes and to protect them form the energy of the currents.
However if you want to know more about this incredible technology, its history that started back in the 19th century and why Lockheed Martin, a rocket science company and aerospace giant, has received 600.000$ by the US Department of Energy to develop a new generation of cold water pipes, the better thing you can do is reading this comprehensive article by Phil Mckenna on NewScientist:
Plumbing the oceans could bring limitless clean energy
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The Pirelli Calendar (or simply "The Cal", as it is nicknamed) it's much more than what the word calendar could occur to you. For more than 40 years it has been an object of cult for photography lovers, beauty and elegance fan as well as scholars of costume history. It's not even for sale and its distribution does not follow any commercial logic.
The 36th edition of this "work of art" have been recently presented in Berlin. You may think this is a quite unusual topic for this blog but the truth is that it is not because this edition have a strong environmental message and as you can see in the images below the majority of the pictures are strictly related to the water.
The photographer of this edition is Peter Beard, a real genius and artist of visual communication. The pictures are set in uncontainated regions of Africa like the Okavango Delta (look at it via Google Maps) which have always been the elected places for Beard work.
Peter Beard have strongly brought his own pictorial style in the calendar, creating 56 plates which himself defined "a living sculpture". Marco Tronchetti Provera, Pirelli's President has judged it as the best edition ever and I totally agree with him.
As I was telling before Beard pictures are related to climatic changes, global warming and impoverishment of the environmental resources and this kind of message has deeply involved the whole production process of the Cal:
Joining LifeGate project infact, Pirelli will create and protect a new forest are in Costa Rica, able to absorb the CO2 emissions created by the production and printing of the calendar as well as by the presentation gala. On top of that the Calendar has been printed on natural porous paper lead-free. Kudos to Pirelli for this way of thinking.
If you do not know Peter Beard's work visit his Official Site.
CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE OFFICIAL PIRELLI CALENDAR WEBSITE AND SEE ALL THE PICTURES
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REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
Nature is often very cruel. REUTERS Photographer Radu Sigheti was there and can now show it with this sequence of a poor zebra which crossed the Masai river in the wrong place. Click here to see all the pictures of this crocodile attack
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
REUTERS/Radu Sigheti
