everydaytrash

Today’s secret word is obtainium. Scream when you hear it.

I read about obtanium—a poetic term for salvaged objects—in this ambling New York Times profile of artist and architect Randy Polumbo. The piece  covers building houses in the desert out of shipping containers and empty tequila bottles and making sculpture out of dildos. Also, it’s about libertarians.

Dave Lauridsen for The New York Times

There’s some good stuff in there about the silly terms people use to fancy up good old fashioned recycling, dumpster diving and conserving. Like “green architecture”. To be honest, though, I found the article itself hard to get into, it’s a little all over the place. Or I am. It’s been a long week and the Internet is destroying my attention span.

Luckily,  if you’re scattered like me, there’s an audio slide show. And for the truly word averse, Polumbo’s Web site has several video clips showing his home and art.

Tags: green building, polumbo, recycling, salvaging

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 1:31 am and is filed under Artistic Trash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.