Princeton Architectural Press | ISBN:1568989970 | File Type: PDF, 192 pages | File size: 50.Mb | Sep. 28th, 2011
General Artists: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch Where do our things really come from China is the most common answer but Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to know more In The Toaster roject Thwaites asks what lies behind the smooth buttons on a mobile phone or the cushioned soles of running sneakers What is involved in extracting and processing materials To answer these questions Thwaites set out to construct from scratch one of the most commonplace appliances in our kitchens today a toaster The Toaster roject takes the reader on Thwaites s journey from dismantling the cheapest toaster he can find in London to researching how to smelt metal in a fifteenth century treatise His incisive restrictions all parts of the toaster must be made from scratch and Thwaites had to make the toaster himself made his task diffict but not impossible It took nine months and cost 250 times more than the toaster he bought at the store In the end Thwaites reveals the true ingredients in the products we use every day Most interesting is not the final creation but the lesson learned The Toaster roject helps us reflect on the costs and perils of our cheap consumer cture and the ridicousness of churning out millions of toasters and other products at the expense of the environment If products were designed more efficiently with fewer parts that are easier to recycle we wod end up with objects that last longer and we wod generate less waste altogether Foreword by David Crowley head of critical writing at the Royal College of Art and curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum
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