by TreeHugger
A Brief History of the Kitchen From Core77
10:17 am in designers, kitchen, kitchens, wayback machine by TreeHugger
We recently did a very brief history of the fitted kitchen inIs It Time To Rethink the Built-In Kitchen?. For those who want a bit more information, Core77 has produced six parts of a history of the kitchen, starting with the work of Catharine Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe), who was one of the first to lay out a kitchen for ergonomic efficiency. More in ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image credit Formica
Fifty years ago, just about every kitchen counter was plastic laminate. It made sense; the stuff as cheap, easy to work with, relatively durable (my mother-in-law has been using the same counter for 45 years) and there were not a lot of alternatives. Then Corian came along in the seventies, and granite got globalized, and plastic laminate came to be considered downmarket.
But it is an interesting product, really just paper laminated under pressure together with phenolic resin. Those resins used to be made with formaldehyde, but now are usually water based. Now the
ReVision bar stool made with 200 plastic bags. Photo: courtesy Artists of Humanity
From Artists of Humanity comes an innovative design that turns more than 200 plastic shopping, dry-cleaning or newspaper bags into a colorful plastic bar stool, called "ReVision."
Made by inner-city youth in Boston, Massachusetts, the stools received the Social Responsibility Award by the 
Just what we needed dept.: a spinning bagel toaster! All images credit Electrolux
For the last nine years the big European appliance company, Electrolux, has run design competitions for industrial design students that have yielded remarkable results. Since we love designs that take up less space or are suitable for a more mobile style of living, this year the challenge was particularly exciting:
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