Machine Histories is wrapping up fabrication on the furniture for our downtown Los Angeles lobby renovation. Here are two pieces of a bench that will eventually be about 18 feet long when assembled. We like this phase of fabrication when computer-controlled production techniques are revealed to be a messy and very manual business.

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.

Columbia’s C-Lab recently published an essay by the LADG’s Andrew Holder on their COLUMN page. The following is an excerpt.

You may read the entire article here.

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)

Today we paused work at The LADG offices to conduct a surprise candid camera shoot of our own desks. Stopping arbitrarily at about 1:22pm, we documented the contents of each desk. The results are equal parts excruciating (Ben’s reading a copy of DWELL? An issue entitled Cheap and Chic, no less?), gross (Andrew’s desk plays host to a greater number of week-old food items than architectural implements), and eye-rollingly predictable (Noah “accidentally” composed a still life of Architectural Record, a fresh orange, and VINTAGE RayBan Wayfarers). Where is a shred of architectural mystique? The evidence of big ideas? The material culture of design?

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.

Here are some construction progress photos of a four-unit condominium complex we’re building in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. On site, we notice the connections between steel profiles becoming points of fetish. We look at them repeatedly to grasp some sense of the weight each one carries. This is a strange act because in our other work we’ve gone to great lengths to avoid the expression of these kinds of details. But we can’t help it: there is a palpable excitement staring at a 33-fot span in steel. It’s heroic. The steel, though, is inscrutable. It gives no real sense of the forces in transit. The I-beam discusses the load it carries in the code of its cross section, but it does not express that load. We would rather it drooped a bit, or maybe dripped beads of sweat in complaint.

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.