part of the article – full article here

http://howtospendit.ft.com/furniture/48403-fine-artist-led-furniture

FEBRUARY 21 2014
EMMA CRICHTON-MILLER

In September last year, some unusual items of furniture appeared in the windows of the flagship headquarters of The Conran Shop in London. Severely rectilinear, beautifully tooled and made in a variety of exotic woods, these unarguably functional desks (from £21,000), stools and chairs (both from £2,200) carried not just the allure of their own rigour, but also the association with their designer, the renowned American sculptor Donald Judd. Since Judd created the first prototypes in the 1970s and 1980s, these pieces have continued to be manufactured on a one-off basis, through the Judd Foundation, in collaboration with selected craftsmen. This was the first time, however, that the furniture has been publicly sold in Britain, with all 20 of Judd’s original designs available to order through the store. The initiative, a joint venture between the foundation and The Conran Shop, reflects a growing interest in furniture made by artists – and an awareness, in our design-conscious age, that classics in the genre are likely to prove a valuable asset.

The business is not, however, a straightforward one. There is suspicion on both sides – from design galleries concerned that artists will have no respect for practicalities, and from artists, who worry that the constraints of creating objects for use will dilute their vision. For Judd, however, his philosophy was very clear. In 1993, the year before he died, he wrote an essay entitled It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp, exploring his occasional forays into this line of work from the 1960s onwards – driven, as he was, mostly by necessity. There he wrote, “The configuration and the scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. The intent of art is different from that of the latter, which must be functional. If a chair or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous… The art in art is partly the assertion of someone’s interest, regardless of other considerations.” At the same time, there was no denying that his functional creations were the product of the same sensibility as his iconic, machine-tooled stacks and boxes. For Jasper Conran, chairman of The Conran Shop, it was this distinctive character that he felt his customers would respond to, even at prices that range from £2,200 for a chair to £25,000 for a single bed. “This particular aesthetic is very pertinent to the here and now,” he says. “There is a purity.”

Hungry Cities: Developing Sustainable Local Food Systems Repost from http://thisbigcity.net/

Food is a major resource, like energy and water, needed to run settlements of all kinds. The impact of food systems on climate change is huge: the process of producing, processing, distributing and disposing of food currently accounts for 29% of global carbon emissions. The majority of these emissions originate in food production, at approximately 80%, but the share of emissions caused by processing, distribution, disposal and consumption is growing.

Since the industrial revolution though, disembedded food systems have been widely implemented. Industrialization of agriculture as well as globalization has led to a clear separation between town and countryside regarding food production. Urban areas have become increasingly dependent on the rural hinterland. The global food system is disconnected from its context, leading to social, economic and environmental externalities for communities all over the world because “you can’t run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely“

Full article here

Production of the vital metal will top out and decline within decades, according to a new model that may hold lessons for other resources

Excerpt from the article

IF ELECTRONS ARE THE LIFEBLOOD OF A….

……modern economy, copper makes up its blood vessels. In cables, wires, and contacts, cop-per is at the core of the electrical distribu-tion system, from power stations to the deli-cate electronics that can display this page of Science. A small car has 20 kilograms of copper in everything from its starter motor to the radiator; hybrid cars have twice that. But even in the face of exponentially rising consumption—reaching 17 million metric tons in 2012—miners have for 10,000 years met the world’ s demand for copper. But perhaps not for much longer. A group of resource specialists has taken the first shot at projecting how much more copper miners will wring from the planet. In their model runs, described this month in the jour-nal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, production peaks by about midcentury

….even if copper is more abundant than most geologists believe. That would drive prices sky-high, trigger increased recycling, and force inferior substitutes for copper on the marketplace