aarn: tangible design at fringe [interior/arch]
A handful of small businesses moved into a 4,400sf warehouse located in the Union Square area of Somerville, MA, in May-July 2009. As the former home of a large commercial woodshop, the space was filthy and raw. Many of us were relocating from home offices, or taking the first step towards going into business for ourselves. For me, it was a chance to move the Boston office of Tangible Design out of a friend’s house in Union Square, and into its own location. Fringe was born.
At the time, the Boston Cut Lab was located downstairs from the new space, so I quickly designed some CNC-cut dividers which would still keep the plot open and allow for natural light to pass through, while providing some spacial separation. The puzzle-like overlap of the panels was a way to fit five 4x8 sheets of hardboard in the spacing between the structural elements of the building, and limits of my 250sf office. I did a rendering to see how the panels would fit in the space (below). Six months after I moved in the panels arrived from the shop…but, hey, it was free, so I can’t complain.
Erik Petterssen of Metro Pedal Power came up and helped me install a pegboard sheathed 8x12ft raised platform in the office. Kim Harris had just closed the retail location for Lab Boston, so I bought three stainless tables off of her, and in the process of helping her move some of the last bits from the shop, got a hold of a bunch of huge awesome windows.
I strung together the windows like a wave, lowering the ceiling where the meeting area is located in the space, to make it seem a little bit more intimate. This idea came from something that I remembered on a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. I must have been 10 years old when my family toured this house on our way across Wisconsin, but there is a spot in Wright’s house where the ceiling is slightly pitched, to signify that people are supposed to sit on a bench, built into a wall adjacent to the lowest point of the ceiling. So, I guess that this is what it would look like if Wright did interiors for Urban Outfitters.
I cut some bottles that I found in my basement when I used to live in Allston, threw some funky halogen bulbs in them, zip-tied them together and dropped a chandelier over the sitting area. Other light fixtures in the space include the stock overhead florescent light fixtures that existed during the woodshop days, and some stainless Ikea perforated silverware containers, which I flipped upside down and strung some receptacles through to the ceiling.
The rest of the office was populated from bits bought off of commercial supply houses, and picked up from Harvard’s weekly “recycling”/surplus scrap metal war over the course of the last year. I also picked up some of the new injection molded Herman Miller side chairs during a designer discount sale. Tony and Tina from P-S Design gave me the HM base for my main work-height side chair and I’ve been borrowing the orange fiberglass shell from them for about a year. Some more pictures of the raw space before the build-out are on my flickr. Here are some more pictures of the space that I took with the 16mm fisheye lens that I borrowed from Justin Keena:
