The Arachnid table was completed last week and I wanted to post it sooner but haven’t had time. Originally the circular Walnut top was intended for a steel tube triangular base which was painted primary yellow. I felt the top was too rich and elegant for the steel base and so I set out seeking a complementary base from small thumbnail sketches. When I was able to envision the end result I moved on to full scale drawings. It has obvious Alvar Aalto influences that weren’t realized until after the piece was actually completed. With its curved Maple legs that resemble a spiders legs it’s appropriately named Arachnid. Made of eastern hard Maple and Walnut, the circular Walnut top is attached with Walnut dowels one quarter inch above the base creating a floating illusion.
Designed by Charlie Zehnder in 1970. Zehnder built more than 40 houses on Cape Cod. Zehnder attended the University of Virginia, where he spent one long evening with a group of other students and Frank Lloyd Wright, an event that had a lifelong impact. He received a degree in industrial design from The Rhode Island School of Design and, immediately after leaving the Marine Corps in 1957, came to the Cape to help his friend, Ray Brock, build a house in Truro. Settling into Wellfleet, he bought some land on the bayside and started an architectural practice which ultimately produced over forty highly original houses, all on the Outer Cape. He also was one of the prime movers behind building the local drive-in movie theater on what was once an asparagus field.
Zehnder creatively cross-pollinated with the prominent Modernists who had settled in Wellfleet before him while maintaining his own maverick approach to architecture. He was influenced by Wright and Thomas Jefferson (both as an architect and inventor), and by the geometric, concrete bunker fortifications at Normandy. His restless experimentation with geometries and materials led to a body of work remarkable for its intimate relationship with the Cape’s terrain, climate and lifestyle of informal creativity.
Shop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite common, but now seems to be receding from society — the experience of making and fixing things with our hands. Those of us who sit in an office often feel a lack of connection to the material world, a sense of loss, and find it difficult to say exactly what we do all day. For anyone who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing.
Buy it here.
Gruff is a collection of cardboard furmiture by Arno Mathies. The furniture is made of laminated, corrugated cardboard, assembled using housing joints. A series of mountable and dismountable cardboard furniture, entirely recycable. The series is composed of a bench, shelving and 3m table.
Mathies designed the table while studying at ECAL (University of art and design Lausanne) in Switzerland.
May 18, 1980 Washington state’s Mount St. Helens volcano explodes in a cataclysm that pulverizes its top 1,300 feet, deforests nearby valleys, sends ash 12 miles into the air and kills 57 people. The picture-perfect snow-capped peak becomes the center of a bleak, gray mudscape. The volcano, about 55 miles northeast of Portland, Oregon, had lain dormant since 1857. In 1980 the catastrophic eruption changed the shape of the mountain quickly. A magnitude 5.1 earthquake preceded the largest landslide in recorded history when the entire northern side of the mountain slid away. This collapse depressurized a giant, building bubble of magma that exploded up and out, killing everything in its path.
After further volcanic activity started in 2004 it is believed that the mountain is rebuilding itself. Today the eruption is seeping instead of exploding, but it could change the contours of the mountain over time, as the lava slowly squeezes out to form the new dome.
Read more here.
We humans are at a turning point in our evolution. Though we began as a small population in a very large world, we have expanded in number and territory until we are now bursting at the seams. There are too many of us, and our habits are unsustainable. Having reached the limits of nature’s tolerance, we are finally shopping for answers to the question: “How can we live on this home planet without destroying it?”
Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. I think of it as “innovation inspired by nature.”
The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
Examples of biomimicry in use, solving design problems.
Broder, a Scandinavian brunch spot on a quintessentially Portland section of Southeast Clinton Street. (Bike lane? Check. Brewery? Check. Discount art-house cinema? Vintage stores? Punk rock record shops? Check, check, check!) Broder was packed, but the free coffee in the next-door waiting room kept us going until we could squeeze into a table and order some smoked-trout hash. When the $41 check came, Alison surprised me by whipping out a $25 coupon she’d bought for $2 on Restaurant.com. The waiter accepted it without a peep (he got a big tip), and I marveled again at how well Portlanders live on so little.
“This is by far my favorite place for breakfast in Portland. Perhaps because I like to believe that I’m almost purely Danish? It has a very inviting European feel to it. The food is excellent, and worth every moment of the wait. Very happy to see it included in the article.”
Read the whole article here.
Handcrafted maple serving tray. Size is 17 3/4″ x 15″ x 1 1/4″. Walnut keyed decorative joints accent the creamy maple color. Perfect for serving cold drinks or as a tray for breakfast in bed. This piece will be available in mid 2009 in a limited production run. Please contact me for more information
BMW responds with clever outdoor advertising in Santa Monica, CA.
Jennifer Tran is a Texas native and currently a Senior at Rhode Island School of Design, graduating next month. Her flow chair pictured above will be featured at ICFF in RISD’s booth “Immaterializing Material” May 16-19 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in NYC.
See more of Jennifer’s excellent work at her website.