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In early November 2010, The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG) receives a commission to renovate the lobby of a residential loft building in Downtown Los Angeles. The client is new to us, a respected regional developer, and we are eager to impress. The brief is both open-ended and severe: make the building desirable to prospective tenants, adhere to a strict budget. Built in 1906, the structure has changed ownership and use several times. Each new owner, confronted with the problem of how to bend the building to a new program, added more walls, but only added walls. There is now an absurd number of subdivisions. The lobby, for instance, is roughly a 20 x 30 foot rectangle composed of twenty different vertical surfaces (a conservative accounting). There are now so many walls that it’s impossible to trace the genealogy of any particular one. Each wall is the result of necessity (fireproofing around columns), program (enclosure around private stairs), or whim (separation of the elevator vestibule from the rest of the lobby). Untangling the use value of each wall would be almost impossible, so we quickly settle on retaining them and restricting our intervention to a graphic with some supporting built material at the scale of furniture. The scheme we concoct uses a large number of slightly tapered parallel stripes. Viewed frontally the stripes look like shading on a flat surface. Viewed obliquely the stripes and the wall blur into a fog. It looks like you can touch cloudiness… (Continue Reading)

Ben's Desk - Excruciating

Andrew's Desk - Gross

Noah's Desk - Eye-rollingly Predictable

One ray of hope: we all have snotty headphones. In fact, in every case, the headphones cost more than our disposable Ikea desks. Or maybe that just means we think ignoring each other is worth a capital investment.

The ribs are made of painted MDF with PVC edge-banding. Edge-banding gives such a tight, uniform fit that it looks like the edge of the rib has been sliced to reveal a plastic interior. Black spacers between the ribs are cut from integral-color MDF, which was important because finishing the spacers would have made for inaccurate fits because of variations in paint thickness.

No matter the precision of the computer model and the translation of that model into machine code for the router, assembly requires wrestling with all sorts of other, dirtier factors: gravity first of all, which dictates that each section of the bench be built in a different orientation (one laying flat on a table, another stacked up in sections from the ground, and another build like a bridge, spanning between the other two sections, using a disposable jig as support until the final connection is made and the thing can carry its own weight. Then there are nicks and scratches and sharp things in the shop that mean the entire affair has to be swaddled in padding until it’s delivered to the site. Slowly, an entire life support system for the thing emerges, tending to its eccentric needs until fabrication is complete.

The building structure is a layer-cake: a steel moment frame is stacked above a concrete pill box, with a hybrid steel and wood system perched on top. Each system is the result of a collision between a structural type and a living requirement. At the base, bedrooms occupy the fortified hillside retaining system. The middle level is vacant with no skin – a place for cars to park in the center of the building; just a steel moment frame. At the top, two living levels are built like conventional townhouses.

We like seeing the profiles before assembly because they’re a good document of our design intent. The piece was designed both as a monolithic form and as a set of profile curves so that each profile has a very particular, plucky kind of curvature. Each curve in the array is thought of as a springy band that we’ve attempted to coil into a loop with overlapping ends. The geometry has its own limits of plasticity and spring, a tendency to return to a set of primitive shapes in opposition to our attempts to bend it. This is a slightly different way of working than slicing up a surface model and accepting the sections, no matter what the resulting kind curvature at the scale of single slice. Here the design has as much to do with the parts as it does to do with the entire assembly.

Most recent installation work by architects hangs limply on one of a few crutches: heavy repetition with the hope it will achieve escape velocity beyond the relentless and into the fantastic; or cozy visual associations with biological monstosities that end up looking like second rate horror effects (with none of that genre’s sense of humor or squirmy self-conciousness [or radical politics or soft-core sexuality]). Immuring, instead, rolls around in the dirt with architectural convention — windows, doors, walls, thickness, mass — and emerges with something original and provactive. Typical of Davidclover’s work, the craft is imppecable. It’s, you know, fresh old school.

- Cut sections non-uniformly (not all sections cut in a straight line)
- Amplify desirable qualities of the form using sections instead of allowing the cuts to suppress them
- Distribute ribs and spacers in non-linear arrays to assemble the sections (find an assembly technique that is constrained by the properties of the form instead of constrained by some arbitrary system, like a grid)
- Work only in sheet material so that all cuts are flat 2D profiles
We’ve been working on this problem and have arrived at a solution for some lobby furniture we are designing. The method is shown here with a bench.

Front and back views of the bench surface model. The form is conceived as a thick sheet of material, pliant in the way that thick foam can be rolled in a loose tube while retaining some of the willful resistance of that material's stiffness. Lines embedded on the surface follow the tucks and overlaps of the tube form.

Sections are cut perpendicular to the direction of the tube. There is a "wobble zone" where the sections not only turn a corner but "shake" slightly in orientation at the end of the turn. This wobble and shake in the surface normals corresponds to the willfulness of the material idea: it is impossible to achieve turns and radii without a "recovery period" of adjustment in the form immediately before and after the turn.

Spacers are arrayed along the form so that they follow the curved trajectory of the rolled tube.

The spaces are designed so that there is a rigid lock between adjacent profiles, while allowing: 1) flat custom cuts to vary the angle between sections; 2) drift between the placement of the spaces so they can follow a curve instead of straight line.

Hidden behind the Mona Lisa’s smile is a mysterious code made of letters and numbers, according to a controversial claim by members of Italy’s High Council of Painting, Sculpture, and Sorcery.  Members of the council found that magnifying high-resolution images of the world’s most famous painting revealed hidden letters and numbers added by Leonardo.  Da Vinci, said Silvio Silvusconi, chairman and Grand Wizard of the High Council.  “To the untrained eye, the symbols are hard to discern, however, with a microscope, you can see the letters”.  Silvusconi speculated the symbols (somewhat hard to make out) could be a number of things, including Leonardo’s initials, the phrase B-I-N-G-O, or a recipe for brownies.

A more likely theory is that in an effort to thumb his nose at the Pope, the Renaissance master was actually embedding a code revealing ancient eastern techniques of Tantra.  Known as “Monato” from the Italian word “Monare” (meaning to moan), the technique created subtle sensory effects effects that confuse the central nervous system and promote an explosive reaction of great pleasure.

Obviously this discovery sheds new light on the mystery of the Mona Lisa Smile. While previous theories have speculated the woman was happily pregnant, suffering from emphysema, or awash in the intoxication of chemical inhalants, the High Council now finds it more likely that the Master’s subject was painted after a decent roll in the hay.

Dan Brown fans everywhere are said to be “greatly encouraged” by these new technical advances.