Silverfish Aquarium

Perhaps no freestanding aquarium has as high a head-turning quotient as the Silverfish from the France-based Octopus Studios design company.

The Silverfish’s most striking design feature is obvious from the photo to the right—multiple bulbous fish tanks interconnected by water-filled tubes allowing fish to swim freely around the entire system. Taken together this aquarium looks like a large model of some molecular structure.

But here’s what’s most cool about the Silverfish: Every aquarium is constructed by hand. Octopus will not only install museum-quality heating and filtration systems but also incorporate personalized silk plants and lighting. Don’t like any of the standard Silverfish stands? Provide the company specifications for your own.

If you have to ask the price you can’t afford it.

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Zero Edge

If you’ve ever stayed at a resort with an infinity pool you’ll be able to imagine a Zero Edge aquarium. (And if you haven’t then we strongly suggest a luxurious trip to the Jade Mountain Resort).

Zero Edge aquariums come in a variety of sizes and models but here’s what they have in common: They have no lid.

Instead, a Zero Edge is placed within a customized basin. As water overflows the aquarium it drops down along the side into the basin, which then channels the water through a filter to be recycled back into the aquarium.

The whole process is very quiet. And because this filter system produces none of the splashing or bubbles found in standard aquariums the open surface of the aquarium is glass-clear. Further, the Zero Edge has no visible hoses or bulkheads; it’s a pure fish 360-degree fish viewing experience.

The Zero Edge’s open-top design does create it’s own maintenance issues. Water evaporates from a Zero Edge faster than a regular aquarium. Fish jumping out of the aquarium is generally not a problem. Curious cats on the other hand . . .

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Fluval

If you are attracted to the idea of an aquarium that hides the cords, tubes and pumps —but can’t afford a pricey Zero Edge (above)—then the classy high-design aquariums by Fluval are ideal.

All the interworkings of the Fluval are contained within a classy pewter housing at the base of the aquarium. That leaves the remainder of the aquarium for pure fish viewing. A wonderful value at only around US$130.

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biOrb Life Aquarium

Our gadget blog recently reviewed the Philips HF3490 iPod clock radio featuring an LED lamp that mimics natural sunlight changes throughout the course of a day. The oddly-capitalized biOrb is the aquarium equivalent of that.

BiOrb Life Aquariums are available in three sizes and three colors. Each comes with an LED light that’s set to a 24-hour timer and that’ll will gradually brighten and dim in the course of the day. It will also gradually change colors, letting off a more reddish hue at high noon and a blueish moonlight-like ambience around midnight.

The changing “natural light” of the biOrb is supposedly healthier and more pleasant for the fish. We can’t vouch for that. But we do know that it is pleasant for humans. The biOrb is our favorite bedside aquarium and idea for rooms that get little natural light. Available at Amazon.

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Aqua Square Coffee Table Aquarium

Now we come to the aquariums-as-furniture section of this post.

First up: the Aqua Square Coffee Table by Midwest Tropical. This 25-gallon tank is illuminated from below, creating quite the striking effect in a darkened room. It’s covered by a glass table top that’s 36 inches (91cm) square.

The largest practical issue with setting up an Aqua Square is the power cord. You don’t want to simply run a cord exposed along the floor, so either you need to get a cord cover (that might be unsightly) or somehow conceal the cord with a rug.

Surprisingly, the aquarium requires minimal maintenance. The same can not be said for keeping this all-glass coffee table free of fingerprints.

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Aquarium Sink & Toilet

It isn’t unusual for deceased fish to be flushed down a toilet. But how about living fish swimming around your toilet tank? That’s what the Fish ‘N’ Flush appears to be. In fact, this aquarium is comprised of two tanks: a forward 2.2 gallon (8.3 liter) front tank for the fish and a rear tank with water that’s used for flushing. Add to that a dolphin see-through toilet seat for an extra piscine touch.

If you are a toilet purist (and Spot Cool Stuff admits to not wanting our toilets to double as aquariums, or as unusually themed restaurants, or as anything else) then consider a bathroom sink aquarium—very pricey at over US$6,000 but very cool looking. LED backlighting built into the base provides your fish with an excellent view of you brushing your teeth. Openings to the aquarium are covered with lids that double as soap dishes.

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On The Edge Wall Aquarium

It seems like there are several movies in which a villain works out of an office with a fish tank built into the wall—Octopussy and Lethal Weapon 2, for instance.

Even if your goal isn’t world domination you can appreciate the look of an On The Edge Wall Aquarium. These framed aquariums are designed to be flush with a wall, making a room appear to have a window with a view out upon an underwater world. On The Edge uses glass four times stronger than typical that typical aquarium glass. So it won’t break—until the good guys bust into your office and shoot at it.

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Fish Highway

Cynics liken the Fish Highway to a glorified rat tube. Spot Cool Stuff is no such curmudgeon. We’re fascinated by this pipeline-inspired system that allows fish to swim between tanks.

Unlike all the other aquariums on this list, the Fish Highway is not available for retail sale; the aquariums depicted in the photos on this post was custom build. But fish enthusiasts have been constructing tubes for fish to swim in since at least 1877 when the first patent for a sort of Fish Highway was filed in the United States.

Key to designing your own Fish Highway is making the tubing completely air tight. Once that’s done, submerge one end of the tube in a tank of water and use a vacuum cleaner to suck air out of the tube’s other end. The suction created will cause water to flow through the tube. Once the tube is full of water submerge the tube’s other end in the second tank; the water levels in the two tanks will automatically reach an equilibrium. (You can see how this works on a much smaller scale using a straw and two water glasses).

The Fish Highway is not the cleaning headache it may first appear to be. The water, which continuously flows through the tubing, is filtered in the same way the fish tank water is; cleaning magnets remove the algae. The larger issue is constructing a tubing system that can withstand the stress placed upon it by the weight of the water, the flow of the fish and people bumping into it. If your Fish Highway is not strong and firmly secured you’ll soon find yourself in a wet room having sushi for dinner.

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That perhaps is what self-described cross-media visual designer Ramón Coronado asked when he spent 12 weeks at his Los Angeles home creating his Mercado Negro collection.

Mercado Negro (Spanish for “black market”) began, as many artistic projects do, as a statement on society. In the words of Coronado:

I took it upon myself to take a shopping cart and make a statement with it. I reclaimed LA’s iconic shopping cart and created furniture for kids to enjoy in these urban Los Angeles areas. The project is a criticism of the scarcity of recreational functions for kids growing up in a dense city like Los Angeles.

From that conceptual start, Coronado dismantled a used shopping cart, bent the plastic portions with heat and took an angle grinder to the steel portions.

The end result was the table, chair and lamp depicted in this post’s last photo. Of those three objects we personally are most taken with the chair. Not that we’d choose to have any of them in our house. But the concept behind this sort of upcycling—taking an object and transforming it into another of greater value—is undeniably cool.

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Read more reviews of cool furniture

What Architec’s hot pads, cutting boards and mixing bowls are best known for, though, are their non-slip properties. For cooks who have suffered our share of burns, cuts and spills this is no small thing.

A look at our three favorite Architec items:

Architec’s HotGrips are so flexible and squishy that they provide almost the same tactile experience as grabbing a hot pan with your bare hands. Except, of course, your hands won’t bet burned when using a HotGrip—they can safely be used to grip items up to 600° F (315° C). HotGrips are dishwaher safe and make for good, nonskid tabletop trivets too.

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From the top it looks like an average (if especially colorful) cutting board. From the bottom Architec’s Gripper looks a little like a flat over-sized LEGO piece. That’s because the underneath of these boards are covered in nonskid grippers that will keep the board in place even while you are cutting at an angle or when the board is placed on a wet surface. The Gripper is made from an odor-proof material that can go right from the countertop to the dishwasher.

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Plastic, glass or ceramic mixing bowls? Some cooks feel strongly towards one. The advantage of plastic bowls: they are light in weight and easily molded in the manufacturing process and so often tend to include extra features like handles and spouts. The key is to get a bowl made of a melamine plastic. Nonmelamine bowls tend to absorb stains and odors. And what cook wants the cream dessert they are whipping up today to taste of the fish marinade they mixed up last night?

Architec designs our favorite plastic mixing bowls. They are made from a durable dishwasher and freezer safe melamine. The bowls are weighted on the bottom and have a base lined with a slip-proof material, making these bowls perfect for kids—or adults with the clumsiness of kids.

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That joke is probably funnier seeing it than reading our recounting. And it’s certainly funnier if you are familiar with certain Gehry-designed buildings—like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., the Experience Music Project in Seattle and, especially, Bilbao Spain’s Guggenheim Museum—which really do bear some resemblance to crinkled paper (if you squint a little).

To Gehry’s critics his designs are unstructured monstrosities that don’t blend into their natural surroundings. Spot Cool Stuff has some sympathy for this view. But there’s also something very cool—or at least undeniably distinctive—about his work.

Especially when you can spend the night inside one of his creations.

As you can in the Hotel Marques de Riscal in Elciego, Spain.

Click here to read our full review of the Hotel Marques de Riscal

Die Welt Steht Kopf— Trassenheide, Germany

The northern German island of Usedom is known for its spa culture, its nudist resorts and for its beaches with sand so fine it “sings.” But there’s also a more unusual attraction here: the upside-down Die Welt Steht Kopf (The World Stands on its Head) house.

And not only is the house upside-down but so is everything INSIDE the house. If that weren’t Alice-In-Wonderland weird enough, on the grounds of this structure there’s also a miniature castle and an oversized bench. Constructing all this was so disorientating for the workers who built Die Welt Steht Kopf that they could only work in three hour shifts. Their labor allows visitors today to take all sorts of optical illusion photographs (see example below).

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Device to Root Out Evil—Vancouver

It is cheating a bit to include The Device to Root Out Evil in this post. (There’s a sentence we never imagined we’d be writing). This “device” isn’t a house so much as a sculpture of an upside-down chapel by American artist Dennis Oppenheim. The piece was originally commissioned by Stanford University, which apparently wan’t very specific in its request to Mr. Oppenheim because it immediately dismissed his work as “too controversial.”

Spot Cool Stuff thinks art, especially on a university campus, is supposed to be controversial. And the sculpture itself is rather amazing—it’s one of the few pieces of architecture that has an ability to transform itself throughout the day depending on the light. (The Taj Mahal is another). In any event, after bwing ostricized from Stanford the Device to Root Out Evil went on a sojourn to the Tate Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum in New York and Olympic Park in Seoul before finding a permanent home along the water in Vancouver.

If you go: See our review of three cool, yet inexpensive, Vancouver B&Bs

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Czapiewski House—Szymbark, Poland

The tiny Polish village of Szymbark more than doubles in population when its upside-down house is open to tourists. Like Die Welt Steht Kopf (see above) all the furnishings inside the house are upside-down too. But unlike its German counterpart, the architect of this structure, philanthropist Daniel Czapiewski, didn’t build his house for the sake of being weird. Instead it is supposed to be a reflection of the backward time Poland was under Communist rule. This artistic statement might be lost on you when you are inside the house with throngs of tourists trying to work out which way is up.

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WonderWorks—Orlando, Florida

WonderWorks seems to take pride in being “Central Florida’s only upside-down attraction.” If this implies that there are upside-down attractions in southern, northern, eastern and western Florida we don’t know of them.

We do know that WonderWorks is very Orlando. Which is to say, very overdone and amusement-park like. Kids tend to love the interactive exhibits and activites, from playing laser tag to experiencing a 5.3 Richter-scale earthquake. Parents will want to take a few Advil (and perhaps a set of ear plugs) before attending but will at least be thankful that everything inside WonderWorks is rightside-up.

If you go: If you are visiting multiple Orlando attractions you’ll save money with a Go Orlando card.

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Old School House Museum—Lee Vining, California

Most of this museum near Yosemite National Park is mostly average—just some knickknacks from the region’s history like an old truck, an antique canon and former school house. But for some reason that is not at all clear to Spot Cool Stuff the mining exhibit is in the upside-down shack pictured below.

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“House Attack”—Vienna, Austria

Viennites (or Viennoids or whatever one calls the residents of Vienna) must have done a double take after an unusual feature was added atop one of the buildings in the city’s museum district in 2006. As part of an exhibit by artist by Erwin Wurm titled with the practical advice “Keep a Cool Head”, the MUMOK (the Museum of Modern Art, or MUseum MOderner Kunst in German) added what appears to be small family house violently flung upside-down onto a top edge of the building. Sadly, Wurm’s exhibit is now gone but the MUMOK is still a must-visit for Vienna travelers interested in art and/or surrealism.

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House of Katmandu—Majorca, Spain

The sun-dreniched Mediterranean island of Majorca is a Mecca for partying beach-going tourists. So what better place for a group of investors to build a Himalayan-themed amusement park?

Visitors to this self-describe “Tibetan-style mansion” are herded from room to room for the ostensible purpose of following the life and times of a completely fictional character who was supposedly “a rugged adventurer on a life-long quest for a legendary red jewel, an ancient monk, a mysterious sherpa and a magnificent mermaid princess.”

The concept of a Tibetan living in a mansion, a mermaid existing in a snowy landlocked region and anyone wanting to leave a real beach to experience an artificial mountaintop is so surreal that we can only imagine that the House of Katmandu designers decided to complete the nonsensical experience by making the exterior of their building appear upside down.

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Can you think up another topsy-turvy building? Head down to our comments section

Think Chia-pet-meets-couture-jewelry.

Or, as Juliusson himself explains: “Growing Jewelry is a redefinition of modern values. It is a clash of jewelry and gardening; couture and organism. The collection of this hand jewelry is designed for people in metropolitan cities and is an experiment in drawing nature toward man, as nature being the presupposition of life.”

For men there are two wide, intimidating knuckle rings to choose from—one goes across two fingers (250€), the other across four (350€, see pic below). Both are perfect for the organic gardener-gangsta.

The Growing Jewelry rings for women are of the single finger “only” variety, making them a more demure fashion statement. Choose between a round (150€) and square (170€) design.

Growing Jewelry is available at the Reykjavik Art Museum, where it is displayed on sand beds beneath growing lamps. The rings are also sold through Juliusson’s online store and are shipped out to customers in a sort of miniature greenhouse.

The moss atop of each Growing Jewelry ring must be tended to with water, nutrients and light like any other plant. Care for your ring properly and it should last for at least three months.

Ourselves, we can’t wait for Juliusson to design working miniature 14K gold lawn mowers to accompany this collection.

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If you were reading our design blog in February 2009 you were among the first to learn of an enormous cave house that went up for sale on eBay. This cave dwelling has long since been sold but Batmen-want-to-be can still read about it in one of our favorite posts from this past year.

There are no dials, no moving hands, no digitally rendered numbers on these watches. Can you figure how from the photo below how they tell time?

The design of these “shade sails” are exactly the sort of melding of form and function that grabs the attention of Spot Cool Stuff.

It’s your own hot-springs-to-go! Click on the photo below to see how the Dutchtub works and how easy (or not) it is to bring one with you on your next trip.

Oh, how far hammocks have come since pre-Columbian natives in South America wove together sheets from the bark of a Hamack tree and strung them up between two poles.

Hidden bookshelf doors and secret passageways behind fireplaces—these don’t have to be the exclusive stuff of movies and eccentric millionaires. Here’s a review of companies that can add a clandestine element to your home.

In the 1970s murphy beds were what unfortunate single men had in their undersized apartments. Today they’ve become cool again as the hidden bed concept has been incorporated into high design furniture.

Our planet currently has more than 1,000,000 shipping containers not being used to transport products. Most are just sitting idle. But a few have been put to use by creative architects. Check out these five cool buildings.

Shoe designers are slowly catching on to the fact that the world’s best designed footwear is, in fact, bare feet. Here’s a review of two shoes meant to mimick the benefits of bare feet. One of these shoe models—Vibram FiveFingers—also made the list of our best travel products of the year.

Where’s my front door again? Living in one of these rotating domes might not be without its complications. But these alternative buildings are extraordinarily durable, environmentally friendly and, oh yeah, very cool looking.

Coming in 2010

In the next year we’ll continue providing inside looks into dome houses, shipping container buildings an other cool architecture. A virtual tour of upside-down homes around the world anyone?

Also included on our editorial calendar are reviews of bathroom accessories and furniture (starting with a collection of cool sinks & faucets), a review of live jewelry and a peak at some real-life designed inspired by virtual reality. We’ll also start reviewing more cool fashions home accessories.

Stay up-to-date on all of our design posts by following us on Twitter, subscribing to our RSS feed, signing up to receive our posts by email (in the green box at the top right of every SCS design page) or simply return back to our design blog often.

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fan   |fan|
noun
1. an apparatus with rotating blades that creates a current of air for cooling or ventilation.

So what do you call an object designed to create a current of air for cooling or ventilation that doesn’t use rotating blades?

Dyson, an English manufacturer of innovative products, has dubbed their bladeless fan to be an “air multiplier.”

The Dyson Air Multiplier is a device that initially resembles an oversized lens-less magnifying glass or an undersized Quiddich goal. But the more one looks at it, especially in angled light, the more the Air Multiplier looks, well, beautiful. (How many fans can you say that about?)

Here’s how it works: A mini-turbine inside the stand of the Air Multiplier sucks in air from underneath the base of the unit and releases it through a small slit that circumnavigates the “multiplier loop.” At the same time, the 16-degree angle of the loop’s walls naturally pulls air from in extra air too, an effect .

So what does this combination of the mini-turbine and the multiplier loop add up to? A device that produces a perfectly steady stream of air, as opposed to an ordinary fan that blows with slight gusts and lulls. And a device that produces a wind current that blows at a robust 119 gallons of air per second. By contrast, a similarly sized Air King fan (a fan that boasts of its power) musters a mere 87 gallons of air per second.

Of course, the above-mentioned Air King fan costs only $35 while the Dyson Air Multiplier will set you back a cool $300!

Is the Air Multiplier’s high price tag worth it? Strictly speaking, no. There are fans just as or more powerful that cost much less (the especially strong $69 Vornado 733B comes immediately to mind). Then again, the Air Multiplier is especially safe around small kids and pets. It really does produce a more satisfying and regular stream of air. And it looks very cool—good enough to display in an art gallery or high design room.

For those who can afford one the Dyson Air Multiplier will blow you away.

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