INVITE : Student Spring Crit.
It's that time of year where final projects are wrapping up. Because of this, we're hosting another round of STUDENT ONLY virtual office hours, 4 guests. Come prepared to quickly present your project and then we'll chat about it.
SPRING CRIT VIRTUAL OFFICE HOURS
Thanks to all who attended our monthly virtual open-office hours today. It's becoming more of a salon-style thing. And we like it.
earth clock in our kitchen
Earth clock goals.
Someone said it's a good idea to say goals out loud. So we're hoping to sneak Earth Clock into an airport, preferably one we can visit, before the end of 2025.
Earth Clock is a clock CW made many years ago that zooms in and out of places on earth that look like numbers. You can check out the online version here.
It's mesmerizing, so much so that sometimes we have to turn off the one in our kitchen so kids stop staring and eat their dinners.
Earlier this week, Che-Wei updated the interface where we crowd-source finding the numbers. If you'd like to contribute, please do. It's fun! He also updated our backend where we approve the submissions. The new backend makes this way easier. Here's a clip of it in action.
our backend that shows how we approve crowd sourced submissions to earth clock
our frontend interface to search for numbers.
already found numbers
Pencil Type-C in stock.
The first bunch of them are out in the world and now they're in our shop. Also, graphite refills are here.
Thanks to everyone who supported the KS campaign for these :)
It's all a facade.
The banging started last Monday though it's been years since chunks of our building's facade have been detaching. We're fixing it, but what to rebuild is a sticky topic.
If you visited our studio/shop/home before last week, you probably noticed dry spray foam oozing out of our cracking "brownstone". There are quotes around that word, because it's a term I guess is now loosely used to describe the brick stuccoed buildings in Brooklyn, so they appear as brown stones. It's misleading and confusing.
The steps to repairing a "brownstone" stucco facade :
- chip away the entire outer layer of stucco
- cast concrete to repair anything that is too damaged
- apply a scratch coat...which appears as a slurry of cement with a scratchy texture (it looks really cool in this stage)
- wait 3 months for scratch coat to cure
- apply final stucco (tint it brown so you get your brown stone effect, or tint it purple or yellow or blue. it makes no difference.)
Right now we're in the chipping stage, but the foreman has been asking us for drawings of what we want to re-build. And we can't decide. Most buildings on our block frame out the windows, creating a kinda fake lintel above and a sill bellow. By fake, I mean, none of it is structural. Decorative elements are incorporated, swirly ornaments or flowers. Sometimes you'll find a bird. But we've never seen a skull or a turtle.
The easiest thing to do is to just tell them to copy what was there originally, but it wasn't particularly "nice" to begin.
It feels very unnatural for us to produce a drawing of fake brick lintel decorations. To go completely plain and flat just looks bad. For years we've tried to get our friend Rebeca to mosaic the whole thing, but that's an unrealistic undertaking.
What's cool about stucco, is it seems you can kinda do almost anything with it. That said, if you do a bad job it's really bad. Oh and all of it costs a poop ton of money. We're torn between whether to experiment, or go vanilla, maybe with some sprinkles.
With love and hugs,
Che-Wei + Taylor