Growing up in Northern California, a place that teems with natural beauty, I've had an uneasy relationship with technology. I've seen the region around the bay area transformed into a mecca for the computer industry. As a kid, I watched my share of television and spent a lot of my allowance at the local 7-11 on video games.
My father was a classically trained musician and composer. He often observed there were two lives to every experience - the life of the experience as it happens, and the life it has in your mind after it happened, the recollection. I inferred that TV and video games didn't have quite the same "shelf life" as more artistic endeavors. He usually made these remarks when we were outdoors on a walk.
It must have been hard back then for my Mom and Dad and for other parents too. Mine, like many of their contemporaries in the 70's, were part of a wave divorces. Technology was already reaching deeply into the lives of individual families, whatever their status or configuration. My sense was the divorce rate only increased the role technology played in family life. As a parent myself now, and divorced, I am struck by the theme of "technology-as-surrogate" that has resurfaced for me during the pandemic.
Between the radically changing landscape of what was to become Silicon Valley, rising divorce rates and the more general movement of the country toward the adoption of an information economy, there was, and is, a lot to think about.
Does technology help our relationship with family and friend, or - more generally - the natural world? Does it help us in other ways? Does technology insulate us from nature and make us care less about natural resources that are so worthy of reverence and conservation?
Fig Leaf
It has been said that Frank Lloyd Wright used a lot of 30 degrees angles in his work because that was the angle of his triangle. If the contemporary equivalent is the computer, how does that technology affect the work of the modern-day architect. Without always knowing specifically why, I have seen a lot of buildings that look like they were drawn on a computer, sometimes in a good way, often in an expedient (read: bad) way. I don't blame the technology itself, but I do believe we need to be mindful of the insulating effects accompanying technology's use.
Without getting lost in all this, I bring up these questions as the backstory to my design and construction of a backyard fence. After considering several options for demarcating the property line, it felt like I had spent enough time figuring out what my CNC machine could do in the abstract during this pandemic. Eventually it came time to consider what the fence wanted to be, what it could be. We have a really productive fig tree in our backyard and this seemed as good a motif for the yard as anything.
Of course, replicating nature with technology is a lot of work. I found it considerably more labor-intensive than generating a simple orthogonal pattern of some kind. But it felt like a good moment to remind myself that computers can be used for both economic reasons and for reasons of beauty. This fence was an endeavor to pursue the latter.
Admittedly, it was not the most cost-effective solution, constructed as it was with Heart B Redwood tongue and groove boards.
As an architect, I have read a lot about digital fabrication but I have seen little effective evidence of its implementation in the world around me. Most often I see it in restaurant signs and patterned guardrails on commercial buildings.
Exploded Diagram of Fence Boards
Like so many other construction tropes, the manifest solutions are often formulaic and can be implemented on a fairly repetitive basis. It doesn't take long for these constructs to look "tired" as they enter our collective unconscious on a large scale.
The fence required the milling of 54 separate boards that were designed to "tile" on the fence posts to create an engraved mural. It was labor-intensive, and honestly, in the middle of it, I was worried I might wind up wasting too much expensive wood getting my head around the process.
Thankfully, the CNC mill performed as expected and the process has opened up a new way for me to make beauty out of simple natural materials. I don't know that I will always have the time I spent on this prototype, but the option to do some manner of a natural motif that is tailored to a site has piqued my curiosity and I look forward to the chance to explore it again sometime soon.
Close-up
Clamping the Redwood Boards