Breaking Bad - Art Prints

My artist friend Justin Santora just released prints for the TV series Breaking Bad. It seems to have more or less sold out instantly. I'm sure the last 100 will be available in his store in the near future.

I Think I Graduated from Architecture School?

I haven't written on here in a long time. I didn't realize it until lately but my thesis project more or less just replaced this blog for the time being.

These are truly gems of TED talks:

Amory Lovins: A 50-year plan for energy



Perspective Is Everything

Done

Links for May 13th

First, some background music, Irene by Beach House (hat tip: Chris).

The first several Boeing 787's are going into service. Why is this interesting? There are two main airline manufacturers in the world: Boeing and Airbus. They've both moved to composite materials to reduce weight and increase the range their planes can travel. This changes the routes airlines can fly - it's game changing; new hubs, longer distances, smaller cities being connected, more diffuse growth in general. Where they differ is in size. Airbus went huge with the A380 and Boeing downsized with the 787. In my opinion, one of the lessons of recent history has been to downsize: smaller baseball parks, smaller cars, smaller laptops, smaller homes, smaller cameras. I'm betting on Boeing but to be honest I think the contest will mostly just be awash.

It's no longer illegal to tape record police officers in Illinois. How anyone thought that police officers being immune to public scrutiny in this manner benefited citizens I will never know. In my opinion every police officer should be wearing a camera at all times. Tiny cameras that can fit in sunglasses already exist. Why shouldn't we be allowed to see the activities of those who have been entrusted with such immense power and responsibility?

Apparently being unemployed is bad for people. No shit? Among other negative side effects, people commit suicide more often when unemployed. So yes, in the long run the economy will fix itself, but by sitting idly by we are in fact collectively allowing an entire generation of young (and old) Americans to suffer. Krugman on the matter (sort of).

Oh, and college is expensive. Colleges response: “I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.” - the president of Ohio State University

Picturequote

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. - John Adams

I got a job. It's part time and with school it's already getting hectic, but in this market it's hard to say no -- especially to one of if not the best engineering firms in the city, dbHMS. They're a design build engineering firm. One of the principles was my professor last year for a class called Mec-Elec (mechanical and electrical systems design). Their work includes Aqua by Jeanne Gang; the Poetry Foundation by John Ronan; and everything in the last several years at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Chicago Public Schools.

My design build team visited his office to do some drawings for our building. At some point he joked at how bad our systems drawings were to which I asked if that was a job offer; I started a few days later.

I felt awkward taking photos so it was a bit rushed, but these are my digs.

Looking north from my desk down the Brown Line tracks of the L.

Custom USB Flash Drive

I'm waiting for Autodesk Navisworks to download so I can complete an assignment... so I thought I'd kill some time by documenting what I did on my "day off."

I have all these really small pieces of scrap from all my wood working projects so I took a roughly 3" x 3" piece of 4/4 black walnut (that's roughly 3/4" thick) and made a USB flash drive enclosure out of it. I milled it out on the Bridgeport, band sawed the block in half (in retrospect I should have done this first so the grain fit together, next time), sanded for a tight fit, glued and clamped the wood pieces together, sanded, applied tung oil, wait, sand, repeat, steel wooled, and done.

This is the initial fit on the Bridgeport milling machine. This is one of my favorite machines in the shop. You could make a rocket almost exclusively with this machine if you were skilled enough.

Completed drive made of scrap black walnut, and just so this looks dumb in 2 years, the flash drive is USB 3.0 with 16 GB of memory.

Masters Thesis Project

I've been neglecting this blog because I'm in the middle of my masters thesis project (architecture at IIT). I've partnered up with seven other students to do a design build project -- first you design it, then you build it, and somewhere in between you raise money, go through zoning and permitting, encounter unimagineable problems, redesign the building a million times, did I mention fundraising?, and have 5.97 x 10^24 meetings.

Our project is located on the South Side of Chicago at 43rd and a few blocks west of State St. at a place called Eden Place Nature Center. We're building them a school that looks out over their prairie. Here's our website and a video I just completed:

DIY Christmas

My wife came home with a Christmas tree, somewhat unannounced, about two weeks ago. After she set it down she said she was off to go get a stand... hmm. The ubiquitous Christmas tree stand in the US is stamped sheet metal painted red and green; I'm not a huge fan, so I offered to make one. She expressed her skepticism, but a few days after finals I built it.

It's made from leftover 1 1/4" angle iron (about 5' of it) from my previous coffee table project. I chose a triangular base because it would never wobble and would most easily hold the tree. The three pieces are identical which made fabrication quick and simple. More so in this project, because of its utilitarian nature, I let the material and fabrication process guide the design. For example, aesthetically, the angle iron should be rotated to show the flat side on the outside, but this would require some fairly difficult cutting and welding to make the connection between the three pieces. Instead I chose to keep the top flange hanging to the outside so that the angle iron could be simply butt-welded to one another.

The three pieces just prior to butt-welding them together then bending the legs up and welding them in place.

I tapped the angle iron to receive 5/16"-18 screws.

The finish is the same boiled linseed oil  that I usually use. I use steel wool beforehand to remove most of the mill slag.

Next I had a problem with the Christmas tree ornaments... so I designed some a laser cut them. Bonus: I found all the plywood in the garbage bins around the M&M building.This was a quick job from start to finish. For next year I'm going to come up with some more interesting designs and use  the 1/8" Baltic birch ply (it cut much faster and was burned less).

This photo was taken before I sanded them to remove the burn marks.

The cut-outs left on the laser bed.

 Here's a video of the laser cutter cutting the ornaments out. It's kind of like watching a waterfall or fire; even though it's not that exciting it's oddly mesmerizing and hard to avert your eyes.

I made some frames from Peruvian (tropical really) walnut for a few in-laws and myself. I also grabbed some panga lumber for the first time; beautiful wood but it explodes when you machine work it. I kind of liked it.

The finished stand. Still need to get some black bolts... Home Depot lacks aesthetic options.

The finished product.

The staves (soon to be molding) of Peruvian walnut being routed to form a rabbet.

This was my Christmas gift to my sister-in law. The frame is 11" x 14" (inside) and made of Peruvian walnut with maple splines.

The photos is a silver gelatin print I enlarged from a B&W negative I took of her in Napa. It's mounted on museum board .

My Mom Really Needs a Bottle of Ripple

Muppets outtakes.


Feist - Graveyard (live)


Cults - Go Outside

Picturequote

Dear Mother, 

I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't think there's anything left for me but to be an author. 

Nathaniel [Hawthorne]

A square in Berlin near the Altes Museum. The sign you can only kind of see on the right is Weihenstephaner - my favorite brewery.

Picturequote

"The gods are of no sect; they side with no man. When I imagine that Nature inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls, and specially existed for them, I go to see an obscure individual who lives under the hill, letting both gods and men alone, and find that strawberries and tomatoes grow for him too in his garden there, and the sun lodges kindly under his hillside, and am compelled to acknowledge the unbribable charity of the gods." - Thoreau  Journal entry April, 15 age 23

My sister in law, Gaja, picking blueberries. This photo was made with a Diana+ using 120 B&W film.

Fall 2011 Studio Work

My studio project this semester took place at The Plant in Chicago. I described it a little bit in this post. It was nice to have an actual client this time around, and to top things off it's entirely conceivable that they may implement some of the ideas that our studio came up with - being as that they're in a seemingly perpetual state of demolition and construction.

This is my 3' x 4' board that's on display at the plant right now.

Plan view (Google Earth view).

This is a Sanborn (historical) map overlaid over my plan. The old non-existent  buildings inform the new layout along the old rail corridor.

Birdseye view looking west. The beer garden is in the center with hops to the left and greenhouses to the right.

Birdseye view from the south looking north.

This is the terraced seating area between the great lawn and vending area of the beer garden.

The beer garden with terracing.

Diagram of the greenhouses,

Section of the greenhouse.

The back of the greenhouses. That's a double height rolling door on the left.  The concrete is left exposed so it can be used for work (i.e. compost can be laid against the wall, sand or debris can be piled, etc.)

The hop garden/parking lot made from simple telephone poles and stainless wire rope. Everyone really liked this which is funny because of the sheer practicality. If they actually built this I wouldn't be too surprised.

This is the initial scheme for the drainage of the street and site. I reconfigured the idea  to be less complex and more effective.

In the final scheme water from the street flows into a recessed planting area with well drained soil while the run-off from the site flows through the gabions and into the same area. The recessed area can store some amount of water as it waits to percolate into the soil. In the event of a large storm excess water would flow into the sewage system as it already does.