The story of a drying lake helped Czech designer Jan Čtvrtník to gain recognition in the daily Independent.
This week, the British daily published the list of 20 great green designs. The Independent awarded Čtvrtník for his glass vase design called Droog Aalto representing a Finnish lake shrinking due to global warming.
Seventy years of the lake
Jan Čtvrtník’s design was a tribute to legendary Finnish designer Alvar Aalto, who in 1937 created a collection of vases, one of which was inspired by the shape of a lake in his home country.
Inspired by Aalto’s original vase shape, only making it a bit smaller on the inside, Čtvrtník wanted to show how the lake might shrink in 70 years due to climate change.
“The width of the vase is memento of human influence on the climate of our planet,” said the designer, adding he aimed to show climate change in a more striking way than as if done through graphs or numbers.
The elegant-looking glasswork with shapes inspired by Finnish lakes appeared in The Independent among diverse designs.
The top 20 designs came from authors from 20 different countries, mainly from Britain and the Netherlands.
Filter bicycle
One of the most practical objects is the “aqueduct bike” designed by IDEO.
The bike was designed for countries, where people have no access to water and often have to walk kilometres to collect it. Part of the bike is a pedal-powered filtration system, helping to filter the water on the way home.
Fans of recycled materials may appreciate the The Independent’s selection of “used” furniture: the Danish armchair Nobody’s Chair made of PET bottles and the “Green Chair” designed by Japanese studio Nendo. The second is a fat pile of rolled-up papers that can be folded in the shape of a chair.
Among other recycled objects are birdhouses made of old auction catalogues. It is no surprise to learn that they were auctioned for charity reasons.
Britain’s acclaimed designer Ross Lovegrove made the list with his “solar tree”, a system of solar-powered street lights.
Bricks with marketing
The London-based eco-design expert Marcus Fairs, who selected the top 20 green designs for Independent, is not the only one taken by Jan Čtvrtník’s vase.
The 33-year-old Czech designer already won the Amsterdam-based design company Droog’s Climate Competition in September with the same design.
Jaroslav Juřica was another Czech who made the Climate Competition finals.
Juřica entered the competition with his project +20% EXTRA. The white-colour palette with 44 bricks aims to reflect the current marketing tricks. The author decorated each of them with a yellow stripe signed extra 20%. To make it look even more like supermarket products, he added bar codes.
