And Then, When It Was All Done, He Made A Spice Rack, And Then Moved

Neat video. Neat project. Pleasant people. Lots to like about it. But.

This video is bound to get people who don’t know any better oohing and aahing over it. It’s an iShop. It has the kind of vibe a Genius Bar denizen might like, with some Incredibles style points. There’s only one problem I noticed with it: It cost a lot to make the same sort of workspace that people usually just put up with. It’s like when funky people started living in abandoned loft spaces in moribund manufacturing buildings in cities, and after a while, people started building them that way from scratch.  It only made sense when it was better than nothing. Paying top dollar for faux repurposed industrial space is nutty.

I don’t know where this shop is located. Its location might have overriding factors I don’t know about, but there appear to be many things wrong with the approach they used. It’s foolish to work below ground if you don’t have to. Vapor barrier or not, it’s damp and cool below ground. Furniture work doesn’t like damp and cool. Dehumidification costs more than heat. And a concrete floor is dreadful to work on. Bad for your bones. Casting dust collection into a slab is ill-advised. You’ll want to change the arrangement of tools someday (trust me) and you’re stuck. They should have skipped the slab, put grade beams down, framed a wood floor in there, and run ducts and power in the floor joist bays. You could move them around in the future if you had to, and the floor would have a bit of spring in it for your joints. You could easily affix things to a wood floor, too.

Why does the clerestory face west? If it faced south, you’d get early sun, and heat up the place when it was cool, and it would be cooler in the late afternoon. An egregious error only an architect could make. An average person that had been dropped on their head frequently as a child wouldn’t be that dumb. Six years of architecture school is necessary to be that confused. Why so few windows? All that available natural light, and you build a semi-subterranean bunker. Is Albert Speer your architect? Expecting the Russians?

I spent many years making things on a concrete slab in a dark, damp hole in the ground. Only an undertaker will get me in one again.