This is the earliest design project cataloged in my sad little list here.

It’s a piece of furniture, it was inspired by what I considered “cool” architecture at the time, and I designed it about the same instant that I attended my first class at the Boston Architectural College, before I decide to go Big Time to the Big Schools — a decisive course of action that sent off me to Yale and apparently a permanently-darkened life. (I don’t know, does that seem a bit over-the-top?)

But, here, this thing: so I only owned a small Sony Trinitron television at the turn of the century, one of the bulky, heavy old CRT types, and I needed a stand or cabinet for the my bedroom to hold it off the ground along with some associated electronic components (the amplifier, the CD player, the VHS recorder, etc. — the sort of consumer good that seems to have been miniaturized out of existence in the last few decades).

And also, I had recently picked up, rather randomly at the local “book superstore”, a fascinating architectural monograph: Morphosis Buildings and Projects 1993-1997 (Rizzoli 1999). Morphosis, of course, then as now is the Los Angeles-based architecture firm whose leading light was and is architect Thom Mayne. The book was and is fascinating, for both the projects it contains and the way it illustrates them. Images seemingly bleed through pages to the other side, or cross page spreads unexpectedly, or can be glimpsed through translucent paper; hard-line drawings are violently collaged with renderings and photos…and there were 3D models that seem to have been textured with random distorted images. I’m still not certain: was I overwhelmed by the design of the architecture, or the design of the book about it? In any case the book is an oddly appropriate venue for relentlessly sui generis computer-modeled and -illustrated architectural projects. Utterly futuristic, or perhaps simply alien, the book and its contained projects still startle me — a quarter of a century later — as a sort of consummate,  conglomerate “design object”, or rather Gesamtkunstwerk if you must go all hip German archi-speak about it.

So I decided back in 2000, although I had only taken some basic drawing courses at the BAC and elsewhere, to try my hand at it. Or my computer at it, rather…I acquired a cheap 3D-modeling application from Adobe and plugged it into my second-hand Power Mac. And [cue the theme music from Doctor Who] away into the Alternate Dimension of Wild & Crazy Computer-Aided Design I went. Never really came back, in fact.

Despite some early hand-sketches and isometrics, I consider this object the result of my first attempt ever to use a 3D modeling program as a design tool. The eccentric massing and over-developed framing were inspired by what I saw, or thought I saw, in the Morphosis book. Furniture maker Richard Buck built the various pieces of the cabinet to my design. And the texture — applied to the digital model and later enlarged as an applied finish (by me! The art degree is sometimes useful) with acrylic sprays, glazes, and metal leaf — was derived from enlarged photos of partially-erased graffiti, taken with my very first “3K” digital camera. I remember photographing the originals on a metal utility box to the side of the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, and being cursed at by a madwoman who happened to walk by at the time. Perhaps she was secretly one of the Furies, given the course my life took afterwards.

I still have the cabinet, too, although I no longer use the sort of electronics it was designed to accommodate and so it serves awkwardly as stand for a printer and some office supplies. I don’t know if I like it very much: I think to myself, it looks just like a really odd or even bad computer model.

Years after I saw this piece realized, I shook Thom Mayne’s hand after he delivered a lecture at Yale School of Architecture. I had a bad case of laryngitis at that time (overwork and serious illness were my constant companions in architecture school). And so for better or worse I could not inform him that his work had inspired me to create an “entertainment center” for my upstairs bedroom.