Pay phone booth repurposed as a tiny library — a “take a book, leave a book” little library.
I LOVE THIS — a creative reuse and community win!
This micro-library sits in Houston, Texas, outside local coffee house Black Hole — with a laundromat next door — near the University of St. Thomas and Houston’s Museum District.
(photo by me, Houston-based Unconsumptioneer, mollyblock)
Earlier Unconsumption posts on creative new uses for pay phones and phone booths can be found here, and library-related items here.
Bookshelf of the week, hands down.
Yesterday I tagged along with Lorna, from Knits For Life (my sister!) while she installed this super awesome iphone yarn bomb on this sad looking pay phone. As you can see in the before above, the receiver is gone so this is a definite upgrade. I wanted to ask her a few questions about the idea and her process
Read it here: The Dapper Toad: iPayPhone Yarn Bomb)
I really like this, and have just lately been thinking about abandoned pay phones and booths. Who owns them, exactly?
Anyway this is a cool project. Via No Expectations.
Today, in urban intervention love.
What’s the Difference Between a Parking Lot and a Playground?
‘Urban hactivist’ Florian Rivière and his DIY guerrilla tactics have transformed even the most ponderous of urban spaces and artifacts into gags, visual puns, and humorous critique. Rivière’s latest project “Don’t Pay, Play” divines sports complexes out of the checkered parking spaces of car parks, rendering what is generally perceived as one of the city’s greatest, yet unavoidable ills into potential public spaces.
See more at The Atlantic Cities. [Images: Julie Roth]
Now this is an innovative way to soften hardscapes. Interesting, from both repurposing and urban intervention standpoints.
Phone booths re-purposed as micro-libraries in New York City. (via Designboom)
I love urban interventions, especially when books are involved. (Check out this newspaper stand converted into a community lending library, if you haven’t already seen it.)
Anyway, this NYC phone-booth-turned-book-swap is a great addition to the group of repurposed phone booths featured previously on Unconsumption (here), which includes other micro-libraries in various cities.
Are there other repurposed phone booths that we — your friendly Unconsumption hosts — haven’t yet come across?
Via gardensinunexpectedplaces:
Plantbombing!
Yarnbombing — or the cozying up of the urban landscape with random acts of gorgeous knitting — has already been seen popping up in a number of cities. Now San Francisco-based urban knitter and guerilla gardeners Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek have publicly come out with yarn bombing’s next evolution: planting low-maintenance species in beautifully hand-knitted yarn pockets all over their fair city.
Inspired after this year’s International Yarn Bombing Day, the husband and wife pair call their project “Plantbombing,” and it combines Heather’s love of “urban knitting” and Derek’s skill at gardening. Using yarn, a bit of soil, and some hardy plants, the result is a hands-off, smile-inducing work of art.
For those of you who want to try making your own plant pockets, Heather’s site provides the instructions to get started.
(via Plantbombing: Colorful Yarn-Wrapped Plants Soften Up The City : TreeHugger)
Today, in “things I love.”