It’s not an oddly painted bookshelf made of scrap lumber. It’s not.

It’s a computer rendering of a digital three-dimensional model of…an oddly painted bookshelf made of scrap lumber.

The existence of such a thing bears explanation.

Here at LW4, I have a great many books. Like most architectural designers I accumulate them incessantly, and no amount of culling seems to ever permanently reduce the number of volumes in our library, which is a dedicated room in il Palazetto Ludovici. Just today, for instance, at the recommendation of Paul Lasaine (film designer and art director for, among other projects, the cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings), I ordered a copy of Film Architecture: From Metropolis to Blade Runner, in my effort to understand why the future architecture depicted in films and other creative media seems so much more interesting, from a design point of view, than the sort of thing architects actually seem to be designing for (presumably) the future.

So I need some bookshelves. The built-in shelves are full, to the point that it is becoming difficult to find a volume even if you know where it is supposed to be.

Furthermore, like many people who are not actually builders but who perforce haunt building sites, I have a basement full of odd bits of building material that I couldn’t bear to see thrown into a dumpster. “You’re going to throw away that joist? But it’s at least [pulling out the tape measure] six-and-a-half feet long! If you don’t want it, can I have it?” If I were really in the building trades and built architecture, as opposed to drawing glorified pictures that supposedly should instruct others how I think it should be built, I wouldn’t do anything so foolish as to drag this stuff back to the studio and stuff it in the disused coal cellar beyond the furnace room. Builders understand that the cost of moving, storing, and keeping track of an odd bit of joist until the time arrives where it would be useful is astronomically greater than just getting rid of it and buying a new full-length piece to cut down when that unlikely situation does finally occur.

But, as anyone can immediately tell, I am not a sensible tradesman. And the disused coal cellar is stuffed with fragments of plywood, stone samples, half-empty cans of paint, opened bags of cement mix sealed in plastic garbage bags, odd lengths of lumber, and a few badly-dinged doors. At least once I have had to pay a disposal company to clear some of the salvage out, so that I would have room to add a bit more.

To summarize, then: I have too many books, and too much scrapwood. And I think of myself as a designer. The result: odd-looking bookshelves.

Of course, I have to fold every exercise in planning, even this, into a grand portmanteau of multiple motivations and efforts.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, here at LW4 “we hold this truth to be self-evident” that computers are the best thing, as far as design is concerned, since the invention of the pencil. I don’t just make – using computer software – pretty pictures of things I have already designed; I believe that computer modeling is one of the best ways – short of full-scale mock-up construction – of understanding exactly how a three-dimensional work of architecture might be experienced in the real world. After all, how many buildings can you name that can be experienced only from a single, fixed point easily depicted on a flat bit of dead tree fiber (a.k.a, paper), in two-point perspective? Computer models allow us to experience the dimensionality of a building design, to move through it and understand how it might be assembled, without actually killing a forest of trees to make a billion-gillion perspectives, plans, and sections explaining what happens – what you see and feel – when you stand in a building right there, as opposed to right here, and turn your head to look at that.

(I actually teach some courses on this, at the Boston Architectural College. Not every architect agrees with my opinion in this area. Don’t trust any who don’t. If they were reptiles, they would have had a fatal encounter with an asteroid by now.)

So this putative exercise in polychromed scrapwood (see the Mayne Cabinet for how I plan on adding some of that color) has also served as a test vehicle for the possibilities of using a particular piece of software, the open-source modeling package Blender, as a design tool (and not just a design visualization tool). Yes it passed the limited (polychromed-scrapwood-bookshelf-with-odd-angles) test, although the software was not without its quirks as a precision design modeling system (something that will be touched on in a technical article at some point). Blender units? Why can’t I use something rational, like mm or inches? Furthermore, it seems Blender will soon be subject to a major user interface change, and the alpha version of the new interface did not strike me as an improvement, or particularly flexible, and it didn’t like my computer. So it remains to be seen whether I will spend any more time designing scrapwood furniture, or architecture, with Blender. At least it is free, and if after the version update Blender proves unusable then all I will have wasted with it will be a small amount of time.

The true test of both the software and my design skills will be whether or not I can now extract precision dimensions from this model and then build this thing from the “raw material” I have in mind. Of course, one of the other reasons wood becomes scrapwood is because it has some flaw or innate distortion that tends to preclude reasonably precise carpentry, so it is possible that I am not being fair to either Blender or myself with this test.