[de]sein

tonight, m.b. was listening to a shins song that i was humming along to and he asked whether i had heard their new album. while i had not heard the album, which i told him, i could tell him exactly where, in a car on s st. about to turn onto 16th, that i had heard an npr review of the record. i realized that this is a common theme in my memory. i can remember exactly where certain events happened, but i cannot tell you when. if you ask me about a piece of text that i have read, if i remember it, i can generally tell you exactly where i was when i read it. or where on the page that paragraph occured. in school, this was particularly maddening. finding myself in a physics or calculus exam, i would need to recall some fact or equation and i could picture in my head the page that it was on, where it occured on the page, and where i was when i noted it, but i generally could not bring the specifics (which is all i really wanted) into focus. there are conversations i remember having in high school that i can tell you exactly where they happened, and generally what was said, but i could not tell you when it occured, unless there were very specific context clues to provide an anchor (who i was dating, what the conversation entailed, etc.).

i wish that i could express this better, and i wish even more that at some point i will find a way to show it visually, or in an object. that would be interesting.

today was a trip to exotic lumber in gaithersberg, md. sadly i was disappointed. while i did find the cherry that i was looking for, i did not in fact find any dark-eyed beauties or a dimly lit smoky interior, or even incense for that matter. there was a whole lot of wood though, and many of them had fun numbers on them written in chalk. which i guess could pass for exotic, if one weren’t familiar with large stacks of wood in a warehouse. not ‘exotic’ in every sense of the word, i guess. but they were exceedingly nice and helpful.

so i got back to the shop and mike and i began milling the lumber for the toy box that we will be making.

a strip of wall in my apartment is dedicated to drawing. from time to time i make use of this strip of wall. sometimes i’ll show you what is on it.

this was a ’stream of consciousness’ drawing. of which most of mine are right now. i’m curious to see exactly what comes out when i put my pen to the page. eyes crop up a lot in my drawings, i think mainly because i’m fairly good at drawing them. there also appears to be a slightly anthromorhpic curving matchstick and a person crouching with a flower coming out of their butt. who knew?

so i know that no one is currently reading this thing, but i’m going to post this like there are. maybe in the future someone will actually find this page and therefore discover the bouroullec brothers.

i found these guys’ website a few weeks ago while researching grad schools that i may want to go to. anyway, seeing their work was the most inspiring design moment i have had in a long time. they are doing very interesting things and i enjoyed looking at them. so, lonely reader of the future, enjoy. (and let me know how the future is).

this is my first attempt to creat some sort of wall art for my upcoming show. the idea being to take images of our students, convert them into black and white (not grayscale, black and white) and then use the laser engraver to supply the tone. i am also attempting to put to use my fascination with the scrap bin and the idea of pixelation. all of the wood in these images was taken from the scrap bin and cut into 1 inch x 1 inch “pixels.” obviously the mult-species version is completely unreadable. the all maple version is slightly better. i believe that at a bigger scale, things may become easier to distinguish. of course that means a lot more pixels… a lot. good thing we have a plethora of scrap.

(if you squint and turn your head a little, you might be able to tell that these are faces.)

so a couple of months ago, the fabuloso ladies over at homebody dc, erin and henriette, told me that the dc institute of architects puts out a quarterly publication and they were thinking of profiling the store and they might want to put a picture of my table in there. fine with me. so i go and pick up one of the magazines today (okay, i ended up getting 5) and there is my table, and pretty much the whole text is about it. and me! it’s a banner day for justin. drinks are on me. here’s the text:

“At Homebody on Capitol Hill, a totally different design aesthetic is at work. There, the District Table by industrial designer Justin Couch is a clever, irreverent approach to home furnishings. The low table, in the broken diamond shape of the District map and picutred here in walnut ply, but can be fabricated in birch, maple, or cherry. Couch, who is currently the resident artist at DC’s Artisans’ Workshop, can make the table to order in 4-6 weeks. The base price (in birch) is $525 and can be ordered exclusively through Homebody, where proprietors Erin Mara and Henriette Fourcade offer Washington homeowners “great design that is truly within reach.”

so i’m clever and irreverent. ok.

here is the latest, and possibly last, of the iterations of my 7 sine stool. in this version i have added curvature to both the seat of the stool and to the finger joints along the front edge. this is hard to explain in text, but each stool is composed of two halves. the two halves can be connected by a small key (not shown) in three different orientations: two versions of the stool and one making a skinny side table. when a second stool is added, more combinations become apparent. more pictures to come that will explain all.

on december 14, i delivered my first two ordered pieces! erin and henriette, the owners of homebody dc, and another patron received their tables, and i was quite pleased with how they turned out. i hope that the new owners enjoy them.

so here it begins, my foray into the world of universally [sic] available thought. after a conversation this evening with a dear friend of mine, i decided that it is time to get my thoughts out. so here they are.