We've just put up our tree in the office!
Decorated the library....
And put lights on our robots!
Happy Holidays from all of us at BWC!
Jeffrey McGrew, our principal and co-founder, gave a keynote speech at Autodesk University this year! The whole keynote is embedded above, and Jeffrey's on around 24 minutes in.
Core 77 also transcribed his speech, and posted it on there blog, with a nice little forward.
We're very proud to announce that our own Jeffrey McGrew will be giving one of the keynote presentations at this year's Autodesk University.
With over 9,000 people attending, this is very exciting news indeed! We'll be briefly sharing the story of Because We Can and some of the work we've done. Buy a robot and change the world!
We're also giving a more formal hour long presentation on 'The Five Myths of Digital Fabrication'. We'll cover the five most common mistakes (and how to avoid them) that we see people make when they first get into making things via Digital Fabrication.
We'll also be doing a bonus talk, more informal, in The Lounge about how we made the tails for the Serpent Twins (that we made a recent Instrucable for).
We hope to see you in Vegas!
We are renovating a historic building in Southern California to be an office building and machine shop. It is a big fun project! And we are finalizing the design concepts now. Here is the facade of the building, a cleaned up and renovated version of the current existing historical building. To the right is the building's parking lot and on the left is the enclosed patio and then machine shop.
The machine shop facade echos the office building in shape, but then plays with different materials. We are making the designs here very solar conscious, which is why we have the slats in front of the windows. Due to the intense sun down there, we feel it is necessary to optimize shade with the exterior treatments so the interior cooling of the buildings can be at a minimum.
Here the conference room looks out onto the patio, which is shaded with greenery and stretched fabric shades. We are designing the whole interior, patio and much of the furniture for this project... so stay tuned for more updates on that!
Our good friends over at the Instructables asked us if we wouldn't post up how we made the Serpent Twin's tails. So here it is!
Enjoy! It's our first big instructable so we'd love for you to go there and leave us a comment on it.
Also, if you want to see the Serpent Twins in person, there is a big party this weekend at Jon's shop. All are welcome!
Come to East Bay Mini Maker Faire this Sunday! Use this code and get a discount on tickets: BECAUSEWECAN You can buy tickets here
Use that code and get 15% off tickets for the event on Sunday, October 16th at the Park Day School campus + Studio One Art Center in the Temescal district of Oakland
We'll be there! & hope to see you there!!!
This Friday - Oct. 14th - 6PM to 10PM2500 Kirkham St, Oakland
We are having a Halloween Open House, and all are invited!
WATCH! As a giant robot moves using the powers of E-Lec-TricitY.... and CUTS! everything in it's path!
MARVEL! As EVIL Professor Kitty SHREDS! another office chair!
COME! To West Oakland! and see some ART in progress!!!
It will be horrifying in the best way. Hope to see you here!
Because We Can 2500 Kirkham St. Oakland 510-922-8846
Costumes and extra drink welcome!
Our good friends over at Envie Interactive have created an amazing interactive environment that you can (and should!) go play in online. It's called VIE, and it is free to play! But they came to us to for help creating an environment for themselves in this world.
Distressed Patina Aluminum letters with a nice back shadow display their company name when you first walk through the doors.
And to accompany the signage, a glowing 'V' in the shape of their logo. The 'V' encases an LED flexible tube light that mimics neon, but never gets hot and uses hardly any power. We love that!
It is a dramatic symbol that is seen from the font door in its glowing majesty.
Cryptic slabs of stone with 'ancient' secret messages were created to be found in the game.... and in reality!
It's now as cool a place to work as it is online!
Because We Can showed up on the East Bay Mini Maker Faire site the other day in a cool article about what we will be presenting at the Faire on October 16th.
What's that? You've never heard of East Bay Mini Maker Faire? (or... EBMMF??) Well this is its second year and it is super fun! One day only, October 16th, in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland. You can find all the deets on it here.
We hope to see you there! It's a great collection of local Makers. And though it's not as big as the big official MakerFaire, is's certainly big enough to keep your interest for one day. See you there!
A couple months ago we signed on to help with Form & Reform's project for the Burning Man festival: The Serpent Twins project. After a very busy few months (and one very dusty adventure!) they came together wonderfully.
The final two fully-drivable serpent sculptures not only look amazing, they are filled with color-changing LEDs. Color and video routines can play down their entire length, creating stunning effects. With a full sound system and accelerometer built into each head, the lights can also change and react depending on the movement and sound as they drive along.
One of the main parts we helped out with were the tails.
While the heads were largely handmade, the tails were fully digitally fabricated. It took a combination of software tools to make this happen. The graceful original form was modeled in Revit, bulkheads and bolts then rationalized in Inventor, and the skin unfolded in Rhino. The digital files for the entire thing were sent out for high-definition CNC plasma cutting. The internal frame slotted together, welded, and then the skins were bolted on. The 'carvel' style skinning lends the tails a very viking ship look and construction, while the fasteners and finishing fit into the overall aviation-theme.
The sheet metal skins of the tails are bolted around a bulkhead frame...
And then attached to their own trailer, where we hide the batteries and generator.
We also designed and milled the thick acrylic decorative glowing medallions to adorn the sides of the serpents.
The white Serpent's body is made up of white plastic barrels that glow from within with LEDs. And the black Serpent has black metal barrels with scale designs plasma-cut cut into them, allowing the same LED light-show to glow ominously. We made many templates, jigs, and fixtures via our CNC machine to help support the largely hand-made processes Form & Reform's traditional blacksmithing demands.
Each head is built on small electric car that is super fun and easy to drive, and all the barrels track so perfectly that you can weave in and around people and things in a most snake-like way. But of course, you must be wearing a winged aviator cap to operate these vehicles! As Kyrsten Mate so fashionably displays...
Check out more photos on Flickr!
UPDATE: Now with video! Here's a nice movie showing how wonderfully they move.
Just posted to our projects page, the rolling, fold up kiosks we made for Anno Domini Art Gallery in San Jose. They have debuted at the San Jose first Fridays, and will be a regular there, so go check em out sometime!
Here they are all folded up during the day:
This is the cool wall on the back of Anno Domini, also worth checking out!
And here they are getting shipped!
This Friday, join us in downtown San Jose for another ArtCar Fest! We will be hanging out around the awesome gallery AnnoDomini, and the cool cars will be in the parking lot right next door.
We recently made these giant rolling art kiosks for the gallery, come check em out!
Cool cars like this one from Jon Sarriugarte, Form & Re-Form will be there (yup, that's a car seat in the front).
And definitely this totally awesome one from the artist Philo, co-founder of Envie Interactive.
Here is a good article to read if you need to get inspired to go.
Hopefully we will see you there! 6PM-11PM Anno Domini Gallery 366 South First Street San Jose, CA 9511
Our recent trip down to southern California and Arizona was inspiring and fun! There is so much great architecture out that way. From SoCal's beach front Googie buildings, to LA's modern landscape to Arizona's old west, we took it all in, and came back inspired.
We traveled to Huntington Beach for the RTC conference, where we gave a presentation on digital fabrication and the processes we have created in-house to realize a workflow from design to fabrication. The conference was great. Lots of very knowledgeable people, great classes and a small enough venu that we were able to talk and meet many great new people.
Huntington beach is literally 'Surf City USA'… where all those cool guys were surfing in the 60's. Now it's a cute resort town with beautiful views, so the conference location was great!
Here is Jillian, enjoying those said views…
From there we traveled down to San Diego, going along the shore past Laguna Beach. This area of CA is filled with old Googie buildings. We love it! This enormous Googie structure is an upscale clothing store.
Just look at that awesome light!
Continuing South through Laguna Beach we heard tale of an amazingly decorated Tiki Bar. Turns out it's once famed interior has been renovated, so it is not as impressive as it was years ago. They do, however, have a great Tiki mug you can get. Which of course, we did. Love the menu graphics too!
Onto San Diego where the SoCal Googie architecture does not stop. From decorative shade walls...
To liquor stores. The Googie is everywhere!
And then further south even more to the Salton Sea, past Palm Springs and into the dessert where this forgotten town lends its self to amazing photo ops.
Parts of the Salton Sea are slowly sinking into the ground. Abandoned trailers from another time.
Investigating that area further you will find outsider art environments that blow your mind, and expand your imagination. You suddenly realize how many ways there are to live in this world.
From Salvation Mountain
to Slab City
And then into The Center of the World
A place that holds the worlds history.... from one man's point of view...
Into Arizona the architecture changes from whimsy art enviroments and space age futurism to Old West ghost towns and abandoned mines.
A different kind of beautiful given to us from this barren desert landscape.
Cruzing back home, we make a stop in LA, to soak in more SoCal art and culture. Culver City gives us huge awesome murrals where ever we seem to turn...
And fun ideas with modern arcitecture. Check out the cool green acrylic over glass windows on the front of this school!
And onto newly renovated LACMA
And of course, the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art, which is such an amazing building, designed to hold japanese calligraphy paintings.
We return to the Bay Area, happy to be home in our temperate weather, and fully inspired from the architecture all around us.
The Serpent Twins are coming along, but still have lots to go.The heads of each critter is framed out, and now come all the details and finishing bits.
One Serpent will be all black, and one all white. Here the white one awaits it's head...
The fins for the "backs" of the serpents were cut out of sheet metal, then welded together.
in the end, they will look like this:
More to come soon!
Behind the scenes at Because We Can...
Jillian and Jeffrey look at reference material in the Design Library:
Professor Kitty, our studio cat and Director of Public Relations, takes a quick rest on the floor:
Jeffrey and Frank (our CNC) spend a little quality time together:
Fun with textures!
Working away in the shop!
And finally.... it's the BWC robot! Say "Hi!"
A new-ish interior design magazine called Anthology has run an article on one of our favorite clients Hello!Lucky and the interior design in the homes of the two owners. There are some great photos in the issue of work that we did for the Hello!Lucky office:
And some cool shots of some work that we did for the interior home of one of the owners:
Pick up an issue! It's a cool new magazine!
We were recently called out by Core 77 for our recent residential Library Loft project.
The post talks about all the space saving efficiencies we created within the structure. From display storage in the curved stairs, to extra storage in the bench seating
Check out the Core 77 post here.
We did our first in-house metal bending, the other day, to create these 'Blast Screens'!Carving out a positive form that the corners needed to bend to, then forming them in a press.
The metal has a subtle design etched into them -- using a diamond point etcher in the CNC!!
The screens attach onto these swiveling desks we made.
They can be placed into three different height positions with hardware that is built into the edge of the desk.
It is not clear yet if the blast screens are to protect from blasts coming from or aimed at the desks.... we shall see as things continue to progress...
A custom coffee table creation in a modern interpretation of a Hobnail Chest.
Here it is, in its conceptual design phase (complete with awesome espresso machine):
We took this old style that was originally used to make safes with wide metal strapping and big headed nails called "hobnails". They looked like this:
and re-invented it for a coffee table design, with some more modern aesthetic details added. The doors and pulls for the doors are hidden among the bumps.
The aluminum corners and chrome wheels add a touch of modern hardware to this awesome old style.
We milled out a grid of holes to attach the "hobnails" in a perfect straight grid pattern.
A first coat of finish, then the hobnails were applied.
The water based dye and waterborne lacquer were then applied to give it its final finish sheen.
A thick slab of polished glass is added to the top, giving a flat surface without having to cover any of the "hobnails". And the modern touches of aluminum corners, chrome wheels and dome headed bolts complement the rest of the Project.
