North Light on the Burlington Waterfront.
A recent snap from one of my early morning rides. Spring is slowly showing itself… life on two wheels returns to form.
Life on Two Wheels
April 6th, 2009Egg Drop
April 2nd, 2009Rifling through my various portfolios I found slides of work completed by some of my students way back in 1999. I had the pleasure (and challenge) of getting a last minute assignment to teach foundation level design at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I was simultaneously trying to breathe new life into the foundation level wood shop – so I had my hands full as I took time off from graduate school. A mid semester project was to create a device to lower an egg two stories safely to the ground. Typically a high school physics problem – we explored this as conceptual art meets design problem. I placed a heavy focus on ‘craft’ and hands on skill building in my course – be it a student taking on complicated wood and metal working or learning techniques for staging and coordinating their own documentary photography. Concept played a key role in all of the projects – and craft followed as students learned to make their vision a physical reality. Below are a few of my favorites.
A Small Office
March 26th, 2009A project on the boards for a small office located in Brecksville, Ohio. The building is sited in a flood plain and overlooks a wonderful creek – so we will be creative with the landscaping and what will appear to be a massive native stone foundation. I’m working out a timbered deck for the creek side of the building, and we are discussing solar on the south roof. The building will feature a timber frame core and loft with a series of work rooms under timber trusses. We’re planning a SIP roof and conventionally framed walls with cellulose insultation. Lots of stone and wood on the exterior and a collection of built in furniture and work stations throughout.
I’m working through the bulk of the project in SketchUp in an attempt to integrate as much of the drawing and detailing as I can into the live 3d model of the frame and shell.
A Not so Big House
March 25th, 2009Greg’s house in Plainfield, VT – a not so big timber frame with a warm and sunlit main living area and two lofts for storage and a home office.
Detail of the center bent and bracing.
More images and information to come over at Greg’s little company website – Sticks and Stones.
An Interesting Tree
March 23rd, 2009N 42°38.251′
W077°15.726′
1779′
I met this tree just before I moved from the Finger Lakes region of New York to Vermont.
A Table Collaboration
March 12th, 2009
Live edge walnut and ash meeting table.
This table has the mark of two designers and craftsmen on it, and the third makes his mark on it showing his wares and meeting his clients over it. I designed and began the crafting of this table for good friend Tim to use as a small conference and meeting table at his studio. Like most work I take on for family and friends I was completely over committed – but instead of having Tim wait the better part of a year (as he did on his hand joined sycamore and walnut jeweler’s bench) – I collaborated with Chris Harvan to get the project completed. I designed the rough table form in SketchUp then sourced the live edge walnut. While I was working the walnut and making use of an antique 18″ wide jointer, Chris took my design file and tweaked it a bit to include some joinery he wanted to cut and added a repeat of the walnut into the legs. Upon rough joining the table top I handed off the walnut with basic instructions on how I wanted the reversed wane edges to transition to one another, and Chris took over.
The live edges of the top are reversed from one side to the other.
littlecircles
March 11th, 2009I keep a journal of my bicycle adventures over at my other online presence. Drop in and check out our car-lite travels, local Burlington, Vermont dirt road rambles, and my quest to ride a Super Randonneur series and cap it off with the Endless Mountains 1240k this fall.
Dynamic Timber Components
March 9th, 2009I made a quick YouTube screen capture of some dynamic timber components I’ve been working on. SketchUp Pro V7 adds new functionality to create parametric components – in this case timbers and joinery that can change size from an option menu as opposed to editing the geometry. Displayed in the video are: dynamic gable shell creator, dynamic posts and timbers, a dynamic rafter, and examples of dynamic joinery. I’ve detailed two small frames using a combination of the dynamic components and Clark Bremer’s TF Rubies. The components need a bit of work – but in all they are a great first step to creating a parametric based timber modeling package.
New Hardware
March 2nd, 2009I’ve been migrating my software from the old machine to the new… a dreadful task. Two days of head scratching with a timber app and we’ve finally sourced the problem – and hours of waiting for my backup drive to copy then to paste. The new machine is blazing fast compared to the old. SketchUp was starting to bog down with complex models, and the recent version of AutoCAD was nearly unusable.
Dell M6400 with Dual Core CPU and Quadro FX Graphics
Structure Under Tension (we’re all connected)
February 25th, 2009I created this piece while teaching design at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I’ve unearthed it from my archives as I’ve had a chance encounter on a project that reminded me how small the world is – and how interconnected we all are.
The piece attempts to reflect the interconnected nature of the world, where actions we take are linked through a web of ecosystems, potentially affecting the stability of the structure – the stability of the whole as influenced by small actions. A current that ran through my class was the blending of traditional craft with conceptual art – and my students’ work focused on blending the disciplines of ‘thinking’ with that of ‘making’. This object was the result of turning the tables on my students and asking them to write the final assignment of the semester. Both instructor and students would create works that enmeshed recent changes in our world view within an object.
Structure Under Tension is a kinetic sculpture made of wood and steel cable. 26 wedges and 26 keystones form a circle. Steel cable links keystones opposite each other across the circle and individual cables extend outward from the wedges to wooden handles. Participants assemble the structure on the ground, sit in a circle, and pull on the handles. The circle locks together, becoming a tension ring with each piece of the circle compressing on it’s neighbor. If the tension is equal and controlled around the circle, the ring lifts off the ground and floats. When pressure becomes unequal, the integrity of the structure is compromised and the ring collapses. The forces involved in holding the circle together are easily visualized – but the variables in the pressure are not easy to control. Predicting where the ring will break is impossible – as the slightest change in pressure finds the weakest link and starts to break the chain.