Thanks for asking, Conor.
I haven't done anything new for the garage itself. Inside it, I was working today on a little box that will slide into the holder for my radar detector when I'm at the track. It's very simple, just a bright red LED bulb array and a bright green one right next to it. The red light will come on when I brake and the green will come on when I use the accelerator. In the in-car videos I make at the track, I'll be able to see exactly when I'm on the gas and on the brake.
No box yet, in the pictures:
Green means go:
The other thing I've been working on is something for the little piece of yard I have adjacent to my garage. It's garage size -- right about 20x20 -- and it's enclosed, with walls on three sides and a fence on the fourth. I've wanted to put a deck in the space with a kind of pergola thing on top of it for shade. The deck part is pretty straightforward. It looks like I'm going to bite the bullet and use one of those Brazilian hardwoods for the decking (who can argue with 30 years without maintenance?).
But then the structure of the pergola itself has been an interesting issue. There's no 'view' at all from this area, so I thought the pergola should be made so that it provides some shade and also is kind of interesting to look at.
Most pergolas have to deal with snow load, so they tend to be overbuilt. They are also usually flat, since they're made of wood. My concern is that a flat roof would take the one open side (the top) of my back yard and turn it into its own kind of wall. It would feel like a huge weight sitting right above where you're supposed to be relaxing.
I found this picture of a walkway in Central Park a while back. It's got a flat top, too -- but it's a little less oppressive feeling. More open.
And the arches that it does have supporting its roof got me looking for other pergola treatments where there was something to draw your eye up...
But even those examples are a little too utilitarian looking to me. I don't know if that makes sense, but the structure looks more like engineering and less like art or architecture. I don't have a better word than utilitarian.
So I thought about it a little, trying to come up with a type of architecture I could do with steel that might be a little (I don't know) prettier? This one kind of points to it.
But it still has elements in it that are a little bit like something from the Industrial Revolution. So I started thinking about earlier architecture -- and this visual idea hit me.
The Gothic arches in cathedrals are very simple -- actually pretty utilitarian -- but the ribbed vault look of a cathedral is also not a visual design that's ever been done to death in steel. They didn't have steel for architecture back then. So my thinking for the pergola is to create a ceiling with a shape more like a cathedral. It'll be strong, but also kind of elegant looking. Pretty.
But as the drawing above indicates, it's still something I can work out mathematically enough so that it's viable with a simple roll bender. I just work out the radius I want and bend some square tubing to that curve. No complex curves.
Here are a couple more examples I found.
Just imagine shade fabric of some sort in place of the plaster work between those structural 'ribs.'
The nice thing is that I'm not supporting an actual structure and steel is a lot stronger than stone -- so no weird buttresses going into the neighbors' yards.
Very different from my garage. But also a similar challenge.
And I'm sure I'll be making up a lot of it as I go along.
Then Lista will call, and you'll have a new set of cabinets in your garage in a custom matching green..JPG)
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