Category Archives: Design

Cartoons, Design

Happy Hanukkah

A card for the holiday.

Happy Hanukkah wishes to my readers.

REMINDER: If you click on this, or any image on my website, the image is enlarged. Enlarging this card makes it much easier to read.

My first idea for this card was to tell the Hanukkah story with different characters in each panel. I wanted to use people from different countries, accents,… but I was worried that I couldn’t pull that off. Instead, I narrowed it down to a pair of characters. The older character is loosely based on my father, a great story teller.

Hanukkah is spelled in different ways, another common spelling is “Chanukah”. I used the “Hanukkah” spelling because it has more straight line letters (no “c”) that seemed to make a better menorah (Hanukkah candle holder).

There’s much more to the Hanukkah story than I could include in one page. Being a fact nerd (“Did you know?” is one of my favorite phrases), I couldn’t help adding a few footnotes with facts I learned in preparing this card.

Architecture, Design, Garden/Furniture

Wisteria Trellis: Part 1

Supporting vines and creating rhythm on a plain wall

We planted wisteria vines along the south wall of our house, next to the
driveway to our backyard garage. They get beautiful, deep purple flowers in the spring and green leaves in the summer. This wall gets lots of direct sun, and some summer shade helps cool the house.

Wisteria vines are kind of woody and heavy. They need support as they grow. We needed a trellis.

I had two thoughts about the trellis. First, I don’t like attaching things to existing walls. You never know for sure what is in there, and holes can let water in. I wanted as few connections to the house as possible.

Secondly, this wall was pretty flat, uninteresting and kind of random. The two windows are at different heights and haphazard locations. We wanted the trellis to look good among the randomness, not like it was squeezed in
wherever it would fit.

The windows left three spaces for verticals. Given the length of the trellis, about 27′, I knew we would need more than one piece of wood for the horizontals. I designed the trellis in three pieces, each one self supporting but clearly part of one design.

Each trellis has 3 verticals. They connect to a  footing on the ground and to the wood fascia at the roof. The verticals are connected at the top by two shorter, horizontal diagonals and the two horizontal vine supports. Geometry nerds will notice that the supports forms tetrahedrons, a very stable shape.

The pieces are equally spaced between the windows and the front corner of the house. The horizontals that support the vines are placed just above the higher kitchen  window. Because of the strong forms, you notice the trellis and not the irregular wall behind.

I extended the two story deck model and used it to design the trellis.

1st: Elevation view. You can see the windows as faint rectangles drawn between the trellis pieces. Notice that the trellis pieces are regularly spaced and symmetrical, but not at all centered on the wall.

2nd: View from above, showing the trellis, and the garage and deck behind. See previous postings for two story deck.

3rd: View looking down driveway from street.

4th and 5th: Closer views