Stuff I Made for Fun 2.0

The Sequel!

This year for Christmas, I decided to reuse some scrap material left over from a school project to made gifts for my family. The project was a parametric desk organizer, milled with the CNC router from plywood, and we had lots of extra funky-shaped pieces of wood from our failed prototypes. These seemed to be the perfect size for picture frames, so I sanded and painted them, ordered prints, cut the prints to size, and voila!

For myself, I traced, cut, and painted some images of the Rebel insignia and TARDIS to make cheap Star Wars and Doctor Who earrings from chipboard. The earring hooks and wire are from Michael's. I also made mini 3D TARDISes out of clay, but I'm not quite as happy with those. (Dinosaur below for scale.)

This next project was really Justin's, but it turned out fairly well so I thought I'd share. He was thinking about getting a standing desk for quite a while, so he did the research to find cheap options, and we decided to go with a modded IKEA side table that sits on top of his regular desk. For the keyboard, he attached two shelf brackets and a shelf from Home Depot, and it's quite sturdy! (Manhattan below for scale.)

For more stuff I made, check out my Tumblr, with images of chairs and the desk organizer I made for my fabrication classes at school last semester. And finally, here's my birthday present: a new signed James Hance print, all framed and ready to go somewhere on our walls... (If you're wondering, the image is My Neighbor Totoro + Doctor Who = Totorwho. With Switzerland below for scale, of course.)

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Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s. Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion. In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects. Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...

Vertical Bike Rack

The work of our hands! A little backstory: We bought two bikes as soon as we could after moving here, so we could both bike to work. After a few uneventful months of chaining up our bikes next to our car in the carport of our apartment building, Justin's bike was stolen. (Mine was mysteriously left behind, together with Justin's pannier, which the thieves helpfully folded up and placed on top of my bike. My only guess is that the chain holding my bike was harder to cut than the chain on Justin's.) Since then, we've kept our bikes inside, hauling them up and down two flights of stairs to our third-floor apartment every time we take them out, which is usually a few times a week. Ugh. Better than buying a new bike every few months, though. We needed a rack that would keep the bikes off the floor, off the walls, and in as small a footprint as possible, without requiring us to drill into or otherwise damage the walls (or floor or ceiling). ...

From the Architectural Archives: Decoy Houses

Did you grow up with a "haunted house" in your neighborhood? It turns out that some buildings that look like houses aren't really houses at all, but are instead the haunts of infrastructure. I first learned about these decoy houses from BLDGBLOG (Geoff Manaugh's excellent and thought-provoking blog) and found the idea too fascinating to pass over. Hidden among the ordinary houses in ordinary neighborhoods, buildings that look like houses to the casual observer are actually power substations, water pump stations, subway vents or exits, and more. Some have been built this way from scratch in order to appease neighbors. Others are ex-houses, converted from real houses into shells in order to conceal infrastructure or preserve the historic character of a neighborhood. All of them are a bit spooky. Here are few for your consideration. Image courtesy of Autopilot via Wikipedia 58 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY This is an ex-townhouse , built ...

Not Built in a Day

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