So why can't we make buildings the way we make cars? Here's a short clip addressing that from Jeffrey's larger talk 'Talking with Robots about Architecture' he gave at The Interval back in February of 2015. Later this year the whole talk will be online along with many other wonderful talks given at the Internal over the last few years. But in the mean time you can find a much shorter version here, or if you've got a venue, Jeffrey would love to come and give this talk again. Enjoy!
It's time for our March Open House! This Friday, March 3rd from 5PM - 9PM
We'll be opening our doors and dancing (with robot arms), drinking, snacking, talking, making new friends, and raising a glass to all the wonderful people we work with. Please join us!
In the design office we'll be showcasing some recently completed architecture and design-build projects, along with our new 3D scanning and real-time walkthrough technology that lets you walk around the inside of the building before it's built.
While down in the shop we'll be demonstrating our newly expanded capacity to digitally fabricate very complex shapes in sheet metal.
Kids welcome, but it is a shop and a party. Lots of sharp corners around here. And they might learn some interesting new words!
Friday, March 3rd 5PM - 9PM ish
2500 Kirkham St
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 545-9275
Click here for the Google Map.
All are invited, so come on by! We'd love to see you.
A really big wall needs a really big sign! And this really big sign now adorns the really big wall at Clifbar in Emeryville, CA. This now covered wall is a nice addition to this large common room used for all hands meetings.
We love supporting our local client's renovation needs, and Clifbar is always up to something interesting! Working with the aesthetics of Clifbar in mind, we collaborated with the Clifbar team to come up with this raw plywood finish, lightly color tinted in three different tones. This gave the sign a subdued patchwork assembled look that goes with the Clifbar branding.
Installing this piece up high was a big tall job, but nothing we can't handle. Just another big job for a big wall!
We are getting excited for another year of being involved in the Bay Area NewCo event! We will be hosting a morning session on Feb. 7th at 9:30 AM -- at our main office in Oakland. It will be a fun & engaging hour. Jillian and Jeffrey will be giving a tour of the office & fabrication facility, as well as giving a presentation of the back end of Because We Can. We'll talk about how we work together in house and with outside contractors, using the best tech we can get our hands on to coordinate our projects accurately and efficiently: an ever moving target in the construction world.
See the full schedule of events and host companies here. Get 25% off ticketsby using our promo code: BayHC
Hope to see you there & here!
Here is a fun project we did for a neighbor of ours just down the street. To help them update their office, we designed and fabricated this large reception desk using reclaimed wood brought down from Oregon. The style was perfect to match the raw aesthetic they have in their office.
Laying out the pattern for the boards and getting the corners tight and clean was a prime focus for this design.
We love having our fabrication shop as part of our design firm. It allows us to be fussy about the details, and make small design changes quickly to assure every piece of our projects comes out as beautiful as it can, while also being the perfect for the space.
No matter the size of the project, we enjoy sweating the details. Seeing a space that we designed, filled with our striking, beautifully crafted pieces is the best.
We had many ups and downs in 2016, but overall it was a year filled with great projects and great people. We ended it with a fun new event we hope will become a tradition, transforming our workshop space into a wonderfully eclectic dinner party venue for a night. And it was super fun! Here's to an exciting future- may your year be filled with delight at every corner.
My talk from the amazing Long Now Member Summit event is now live! It's a very brief 5 minute Ignite talk, crammed full of my thoughts on Automation in the Construction Industry. It's a much slimmed down version of a much longer talk I gave in 2015 at The Interval, and a topic I've been more than obsessed with.
Humbled and honored to share the stage with so many other brilliant people at this event! You can see all the talks as they are posted here.
We recently bought a new tool for our fabrication shop that let us get more creative with a design for one of our commercial clients. It is always exciting to expand our capabilities, and as a team of designers, we see the additional ideas that are now that much more attainable with our new tool set. Needless to say, the ideas have been flowing!
Our new tool is a bender for sheet metal. With this in combination of our CNC production shop we have been able to make complex forms for our current project.
The advancement on tools like this enable small boutique shops like us to keep production like this in-house, which enables the budget to remain reasonable, and our designs to get more interesting.
We are excited about our new capability and where it will take us in the new year!
Hospitality Design's The Challenge of Creativity Gallery is showcasing The Port Workspaces interior we finished earlier this year. Filled with creative solutions to seating, visual separations, and sound insulation, we are very proudd that this project is getting so much press!
Striking seating at the entry of the building allows for members to congregate together in larger groups or work alone. The variety in the seating can accommodate a variety of activities, perfect for this location; and is a visual draw from the street!
Creative solutions for sound issues in this open area include a large fountain, which itself has integrated seating.
Shipping containers turned into conference rooms, for yet another creative solution for this co-working office interior.
Two more floors of co-working space designed with a variety of seating styles for every desired work environment.
And to top it off.... awesome roof deck!
We have a booth this year at East Bay Mini Maker Faire, which is THIS SUNDAY! (Oct 23)We are going to be showing off some really great stuff we've been designing and building. We hope to see you there!
You can get discounted tickets with our Maker Discount Code ' BWC ' -- Buy Tickets!
Event Details: Sunday, October 23rd, 2016 10 am—5 pm Park Day School campus + Studio One Arts Center 360-42nd Street at Opal, Oakland
Here is a sneak peak of one of the pieces we'll be showing off...
We are incredibly excited to be part of the 7th Annual East Bay Mini Maker Faire, coming up Sunday, October 23!Placed on the adjacent campuses of Park Day School and Studio One Art Center in Oakland's Temescal district.
Use our Maker Discount Code ' BWC ' with for 15% off ticket prices! We're going to be showing off some new product ideas and new technology workflow. Here is our write up for the Faire:
Combining Art & Technology: Making products the 'Because We Can' way “We are developing products the same way we run our architectural jobs: integrating technology and art to create designs with many iterations and lots of collaboration. Using technological design and smart programming as a tool for making these products, we have come up with a line of work that can be integrated into any space. Come see how we take a product from idea to production, and feel free to give us some comments while you’re here!
We look forward to see you there!
Catch Jeffrey at today's San Francisco Revit User's Group, hosted by Ideate, where he'll be speaking with our good friend Doug Smith on using BIM for large-scale Burning Man projects. Doug, a BIM manager at Woods Bagot and prior to that SOM, and Jeffrey from BecauseWeCan, have both volunteered their time and technical skills to help with building Burning Man's yearly Temples. The Temple is a non-denominational place for reflection and remembrance that is a large part of the Burning Man tradition, a big project, and a huge team effort of many people who come together to build something that will only live the duration of the event, to be burned at the end.
Here's the link for the invite for today's event in San Francisco.
If you can't make the San Francisco event, there's the same event next week in Oakland. Here's the link to the Oakland event invite.
Hope to see you there!
Extremely proud to have been chosen as an Ignite speaker at the Long Now Member Summit.
We'll be at the Long Now's first ever member convention. With an incredible line up it looks to be an event worth joining for if you're not a member, and one certainly not to miss if you area. I've been chosen to give a short Ignite talk on a topic I dearly love, Automation in the Construction Industry. The talks will be streamed online as they happen on Tuesday, October 4th.
Hope to see you at the Summit!
Today's Throw Back Friday goes way back! Almost 10 years ago we were working on this office remodel for Three Rings Design. It was such a fun, creative project with a wonderful team of designers to collaborate with. We had a such fun working with you guys! And together we created a really magnificent space that the staff loved to work in, and we loved to visit.
10 years later we are thinking of you! "The Nautilus" space will live on in our memories and, of course, these photos!
Each desk with a different design- we made a template so each designer was able to draw their own desk!
A bar to fit a fictional submarine- complete with kegerator and bubbling sides...
Tentacle attack(!!) room for game demos & play.
Underwater carved archway scenes.
Robot roll-up door in the secret room....
And of course, a parlor..... for more sophisticated meetings.
You can see our full portfolio page on this project here.
In press this week, Jillian & Jeffrey were interviewed for a 'Maker Spotlight' piece in Make Magazine. Maker Spotlight: Jillian Northrup & Jeffrey McGrew
In this short, fun article they talk about how they got started, what they are inspired by and what Because We Can is working on next!
'Arresting Décor at the Latest Port Workspace' is the title from the Oakland Magazine, an article about our latest commercial renovation in Oakland.We have received such great feedback about this project, it is wonderful to know it is being so well received!
From the awesome murals
to the shipping container offices
to the super cool furniture we made-
..... it is all working together top make a great space!
For Forgotten Fridays today, we have a conceptual and reference image that we made for a client, showing scale against a series of two collections we were making.This visual came out looking so cool, that we wanted to share it.
A good candidate for a 'Forgotten Friday' piece, as the AstroTurf hills we made for the project turned out looking so different from the original concept drawings. The little hill / mounds shown here next to our Iceberg seating was for scale, they were never to be physically near each other.
So, this drawing, in some ways is a fantasy landscape. Just a pretty image to start your weekend. Happy Friday!
We're happy to announce our new domain, www.becausewecan.design.
It's a much more fitting place for our company to reside, don't you think?
Don't worry, everything on the .ORG will still work too, so your old bookmarks and RSS feeds remain intact.
But from now on we're using the www.becausewecan.design domain for everything, and we'd love for you to do the same!
As an Architectural Design-Build Studio, We love leveraging technology in unique ways to make our latest designs into real, physical pieces. While we've developed a decent amount of in-house software and tools over the years, we're still very excited about our latest software toolset BecauseWeDynamo. We have mentioned this tool set before on our blog, but with the latest project we've completed, some great edits and changes have been made, so it is worth mentioning again.
BecauseWeDynamo, in case you didnt catch it the first time, is an ever changing design rationalization product focused on taking complex models to fabrication. It is a set of custom ‘nodes’ for Dynamo, which is a software program created by Autodesk as a ‘functional visual scripting language’ for creating, manipulating, and automating all sorts of design data by non-programmers. (And we have released our code openly on Github!)
Rather than write code from scratch where the ‘flow’ of the program is abstract and non-visual, or call on existing libraries, and produce a stand-alone application like a software developer might, tools like Project Dynamo let you ‘draw’ your program and lets us easily create one-off workflow solutions to automate small repetitive tasks and model impressively complex objects. This is perfect for visual designers like us! By connecting various ‘nodes’ together, we can ‘wire’ together a solution for project-specific problems, iteratively working our way through designs as the code runs live, seeing the immediate results.
Most recently we used this tool set to create a sea of complex, faceted furniture for one of our recent projects: The Port Workspaces at The Kaiser Center. The sea of 'Icebergs', as we came to call them were very complex, and each one completely unique.
The Icebergs, designed and fabricated using white laminate, were created to provide a combination of lounging, sitting and standing meeting & work space. No two of these units are the same. We designed the brackets inside the units so the clean form is all that is visible. Using our scripts we were able to quickly make changes to these forms as the fabrication & design iterations progressed to allow for an organic building process. We modified the designs as we built the units, fixing and foreseeing issues with a “just in time design” building process.
This project, like most of our projects, was designed and fabricated in our in-house design studio and fabrication shop using our robust BecauseWeDynamo tool set combined with our CNC machines. The video shared here (at the bottom of the post) shows one of our CNC machines numbering the pieces before cutting them out. Our ongoing goal with this Dynamo project is to make the fabrication of elements easier and more efficient, thus empowering all designers to be able to make great things like we do!
One thing our custom programming helps do is parse the design model, label every shape, lay them all out flat, and then export them to digital fabrication production. For this particular project, it created the brackets and numbered them for location placement. It made short work of these laborious tasks, and helped us fabricate these wonderful and complex designs efficiently and effectively.
Within BecauseWeDynamo you’ll find programs for part labeling, DXF exporting (with proper true curves!), mesh topology walking, edge labeling, and even our own custom old-school line-based pen-plotter style font suitable for CNC production. We’ve even got some auto-sectioning tools (like 123D Make!), and are currently working on Nodes to help automate shop drawing production and development of complex surfaces.
Releasing our code openly on Github allows others to experiment as we are, and the code will come back to us with improvements and ideas that we would not have thought of ourselves. Our toolset can be found through Dynamo through the Package Manager as BecauseWeDynamo, and the open-source code is hosted here on GitHub, which allows anyone to use it, change it and share it again, as an ever evolving tool set. You’ll find on the GitHub site some great working examples, and we’ll be developing more samples & how-tos.
The Oakland based co-working space we finished renovations on in June is highlighted in this weeks SF Chronicle, the Sunday addition. A project that we completed in early summer of this year, The Port Workspace is three floors of awesome co-working.
Working closely with our client, as we always to, we renovated this empty shopping mall in the heart of Oakland into a vibrant co-working space. The project is open now. You can see more on The Port Workspace Broadway location on our projects page.
