Fab Tree Hab

The futurecraft final was yesterday and I found all the projects great. Unfortunately I got stuck in a meeting and couldn’t make it for drinks in the evening. This morning, however, I discovered two websites by two people that I felt were extremely relevant to what I had been doing in class. The first is about arbosculpture – the shaping of living trees, and the second is the Fab Tree Hab. An old media lab project that used arbosculpture to build a house. I need to now think about the implications of these two projects on my work – especially the reverse engineered bookend.

Memories in Metal

Here’s a link to an imitation school desk, with all its markings, graffitti, and dried chewing gum – in metal.

Hand Shaping & Digital Fitting

After making the bookend using a branch from a tree that is a product of nature, I did a simlar exercise with a hand carved dove-tail joint. The first picture above is the original hand carved dove-tail (my first ever . Below that is the reverse engineered joint where I made the tails with laser cut layers of 1/8″ masonite using the flat bed scan of the pins (the CNC router had too many small technical problems that were not worth solving at the moment). The reverse engineered tails fit more snugly than the hand carved ones while preserving the advantages of the hand carved pins (i.e. creative, subjective responses to the contingencies of wood such as the direction of the grain, knots etc.).

Gnarled Root Furniture

Here’s a link to some images of custom furniture made from the complex and irregularly twisted roots of teak and other hard woods. This site has more images and also explains the manifacturing process.