After visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was fantastic but hilariously baby inappropriate no matter how friendly the staff were, Miriam and I wandered the lovely Culver City downtown area, stumbling into Gregg Fleishman's studio/gallery.
Having worked, and occasionally dumpster dived, at MIT for five years, I am pretty well attuned to computational design and like it an awful lot. Computational design is the art of applying computational techniques to design problems like designing a chair, or a street grid plan. There were folks in the building I worked in who were heavily into this stuff, using computer controlled routers, laser cutters, and waterjets to cut materials to assemble into sculptures, models, furniture, and a house built without nails or glue cut out of sheet of plywood with dovetailed joints. I could tell when they had a new project going up when the loading dock started to fill with the remains of 4x8 sheets of plywood after big irregular shapes were magically cut out of the center.
Gregg's stuff is very much in this vein, and he works at all of these scales. There's a do-it-yourself kit of flexible plastic tiles to make tetrahedrons and spiked buckyballs and whatever you want to make out of regular triangles, squares, pentagons, and hexagons. There are the surprisingly pliant plywood chairs of curved zigzags and interlocked pieces. And this weekend, he's displaying his two passenger plywood electric car at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo. Much awesomeness. Miriam liked sitting on the chairs and hording the pentagons.
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