We’ve come across many things made from road signs, including this fence, but nothing as intricate as artist Greely Myatt’s “Quiltsurround,” a 32-panel public art installation in downtown Memphis.
Using about 700 speed-limit, caution, and stop signs (and even a few Memphis City Beautiful signs), Myatt designed traditional quilt patterns in 4-by-12 foot panels. The panels … hide a chain-link fence and City Hall’s heating and cooling system.
“We didn’t have a very good budget for this, and the idea of recycling is part of quilting, so I had the idea of taking the street signs that the city was going to recycle,” Myatt said. “I knew that material would withstand the outdoors.”
Art students from the University of Memphis, where Myatt teaches sculpture, helped fabricate the panels.
(Via Quilts Made From Street Signs @Craftzine.com blog. Photos via Jenean Morrison; quotes from Memphis Flyer.)
Residents of Asheville, North Carolina’s Burton Street Community — a neighborhood which fell into decline during the past four decades — have been working with the non-profit Asheville Design Center ”to transform discarded objects into art, neglected properties into community spaces, and at-risk youth into creative catalysts for change.”
A major component of their improvement efforts is an interactive learning and teaching space, designed and built by area university students and community members, in the Burton Street Peace Garden.
Materials used include discarded signs (a large Texaco sign, pictured above, serves as a sliding door), old windows, and door and window screens, among other items.
More at polis: Creative Reuse Transforms Asheville Community.
House numbers made from old street signs.
via Design Milk
The latest group of Project M—who partnered with Common to create “Common Project”—gathered in Hale County, Alabama for the last two weeks to develop a new community venture. Working with local youth basketball players, they used some resourceful design thinking to develop Common Hoops.
COMMON Hoops is an applied-arts program. Our mission is to empower under-served youth in Hale County, Alabama to take leadership roles and give back to the community through the practice of applied art combined with basketball, and ensure the youth that participate gain a positive and educational experience.
All of the hoops are designed and hand crafted by young people and basketball players in Greensboro, Alabama. The hoops are made of salvaged and reclaimed materials, and each is uniquely designed and numbered.
Common Hoops
A Dumpster converted to a swimming pool; a food court and pocket park — shaded by vinyl repurposed from old billboards, “with puzzle-piece seating made from old fences” — built by University of Texas at Arlington architecture students; an old piano placed on the street for passersby to play; the street giving greater way to pedestrians and bicyclists; a bike rack made from a traffic sign — all were part of a “Build a Better Boulevard” event held recently near downtown Dallas.
The event took place in association with the Dallas Complete Streets project, “intended to shift the city’s emphasis to building streets that are safer, more livable, and welcoming to everyone.”
(via Scenes From a Better Ross Avenue - DallasObserver - Unfair Park blog)
See also: Earlier Unconsumption posts about repurposed Dumpsters, billboards, pianos, and traffic signs.
To add to the Unconsumption gallery of new uses for old road signs is this chair from friend of Unconsumption Will Holman, who says:
I put together this sleek chair out of a recycled road sign and some salvaged pecan wood, materials that were all sourced within a mile of my Alabama home. The signs came from the local county engineer’s yard, where they sat in a stack after twenty-plus years of faithful service on Alabama’s rural roads. Pecan wood is a species of hickory, native to the American south. It is dense, tight-grained, and strong, perfect for furniture construction.
The resulting chairs are low-slung, laid-back loungers; some were left un-cushioned for use on the back deck, and others were upholstered with either smooth or ribbed cushions for use inside.
(Via Will and Startwoodworking.com, which provides a how-to/tutorial. Thx, Will!)
Unusual Street Sign Furniture by Texas based designer Tim Delger
For other creative new uses for road signs, check out earlier Unconsumption posts here.
(via problemsolver)
Another cool new use for old road signs:
Trent Jansen’s “cycle signs” — reflectors that can be clamped onto wheel spokes or strapped (using pieces of old bike tire inner tubes) to handlebars, seats, or other bike parts.
(via designboom)
See other uses of signs here.
![After reading our earlier posts showing new uses for road signs, Friend of Unconsumption Kirsten Hively sent us this photo of a bench she and Becky Hutchinson made, while they were in architecture school, from scrap items from Boston’s “Big Dig” highway project.
The slats and metal cross brace were once a detour sign. The bench’s vertical pieces were made from plywood also found at the Big Dig scrap yard.
Well done! [And thanks, Kirsten!]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljuzinlmBJ1qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
After reading our earlier posts showing new uses for road signs, Friend of Unconsumption Kirsten Hively sent us this photo of a bench she and Becky Hutchinson made, while they were in architecture school, from scrap items from Boston’s “Big Dig” highway project.
The slats and metal cross brace were once a detour sign. The bench’s vertical pieces were made from plywood also found at the Big Dig scrap yard.
Well done! [And thanks, Kirsten!]
Another great project that includes repurposed traffic signs, among other items, is described in Dwell magazine’s “Signs of the Times” story:
In Berkeley, California, the Dwight Way — a mixed-use urban-infill project designed, built, and developed by Leger Wanaselja Architecture — features “a fence made from street signs, awnings crafted from hatchback windows, traffic-sign siding, and a gate fashioned out of Volvo station wagon doors.” And that’s just on the building’s exterior! Check out Sam Grawe’s full story, including information about the project’s interior, and Dwell’s slideshow. (Photo by Randi Berez)
See also: Earlier Unconsumption posts featuring items made from repurposed road signs (table and chairs; fence) and traffic lights (chair; pendant lights).
![Over on Instructables, designer Will Holman, whose work we’ve featured previously [metal signs and license plates repurposed as bowls (here and here); a table; a lamp], writes about a related initiative: working with a group of YouthBuild students in Greensboro, Alabama, to build a fence out of old road signs.
YouthBuild (http://www.youthbuild.org) is a national program funded by the Department of Labor that provides low-income young people a chance to study for their GED and acquire trade skills, all while earning a small stipend for their labor. This fall, my students and I built a fence adjacent to our campus. It encloses a playground constructed by the Rural Studio (http://www.ruralstudio.org) in 1997 and currently used by a daycare center. The local county and state highway engineering offices donated old road signs, which we then cut, sanded, filed, and drilled to create pickets. Using jigs and a self-organized assembly line, the students manufactured nearly a thousand pickets for roughly 225 linear feet of fencing.
(via Road Sign Fence)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_likmxeAu0V1qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
Over on Instructables, designer Will Holman, whose work we’ve featured previously [metal signs and license plates repurposed as bowls (here and here); a table; a lamp], writes about a related initiative: working with a group of YouthBuild students in Greensboro, Alabama, to build a fence out of old road signs.
YouthBuild (http://www.youthbuild.org) is a national program funded by the Department of Labor that provides low-income young people a chance to study for their GED and acquire trade skills, all while earning a small stipend for their labor. This fall, my students and I built a fence adjacent to our campus. It encloses a playground constructed by the Rural Studio (http://www.ruralstudio.org) in 1997 and currently used by a daycare center. The local county and state highway engineering offices donated old road signs, which we then cut, sanded, filed, and drilled to create pickets. Using jigs and a self-organized assembly line, the students manufactured nearly a thousand pickets for roughly 225 linear feet of fencing.
(via Road Sign Fence)
