The huts from the makers fair, put together out of the panels that exist. A crate is 2200 by 2200, so every side is two panels of 1100 × 2200. Composing them is what this is for, so a panel here is a type and not a single plank: use the same window eight times if you want a hut that is all glass, and the tool counts afterwards how many you would have to build. You look at the village from above, the way you look at a model on a table: you turn it, you tilt it, you come closer.
Photograph the spot where they should stand, then line the huts up with it: put the horizon where the horizon is, and the rest is one slider for the lens and one for the size. A photograph is taken at eye level, so drag the view down to about there first. Nothing is sent anywhere — the picture stays in this browser, and it is gone when you close the page.
Drag to go round it: sideways turns the village, and dragging down tilts it towards you until you are looking straight onto it. Scroll or pinch to come closer. A side with no panels in it is a side you can see straight through — that is the whole trick of the village, and from above you see it in every hut at once. The windows are open too: the glass is out of them and only the aluminium rim is left, so a hut full of windows really is a hut you look through.
Drag a hut to move it, tap one to work on it — the view above swings over to whichever hut that is. Every hut has a grip on its corner: drag that and it turns, five degrees at a time. The button does fifteen in one tap. Two crates cannot stand in the same place, so a hut you push into another slides along it instead.
Two openings that face each other are a way through. Stand a hut with its open side against the open side of the next one and the tool puts a frame between them — floor, roof and two cheeks, as long as the gap — and you walk out of the one and into the other. It is nothing you switch on: it follows from where the crates stand, so the plan counts them and the 3D file carries them. Facing them by hand means aiming to the degree, so there is a button for it.
A hut can be three crates high. Stack one on top and it is a crate of its own: its own eight panels, its own open sides, so you choose what stands where floor by floor. Two high is four and a half metres, and there is no room beside a crate for stairs — so the tool puts a ladder against it, at the side you can get in at the top, fifteen degrees out of plumb and a rung every thirty centimetres, coming up through a hatch that is a quarter of the floor. It travels in the 3D file as its own group.
Below, every floor of a stack is on the page at once: each side is drawn as its own elevation, top storey at the top. There is no floor to be on and nothing to switch — you tap the board you mean.
Pick a panel below and it stays in your hand: tap slot after slot and it goes in each one. Tap the panel again to put it down. A panel is also a door — hang it on hinges and it swings out, on the plan and in the village. And a plank has two faces and no top: turn it round or stand it on its head and the same window sits somewhere else entirely.
Twelve panels with a window were built, and the blank one is plywood you still have. Using one twice is how you get a hut full of windows, and the count on the card says how often it stands somewhere. Switch to the ones that exist and the tool goes back to the fair as it was: a panel stands in one place only.
One file with the whole village in it: a Collada for SketchUp and an OBJ for Blender, both in millimetres and standing the right way up, and the panel photographs beside them as the materials. The windows come out open — the glass is cut out of the pictures, so you look straight through them there too. Plain leaves the photographs behind and gives you bare boards, which is the one to take when you are going to draw on it rather than look at it.
The huts are real. Refunc builds them, and hires them out — for a fair, a festival, a market, a courtyard, a shop that needs a front for a fortnight. One crate or a village of them, with the panels you put together here or with whatever the yard has that week.
Put your village together, take it out as 3D, and send it over: denis@refunc.nl — subject Crate House. Tell us where it has to stand and for how long and we will tell you what it takes.
Refunc · Den Haag · refunc.nl
the makers fair huts · 21-08 00:25
| Hut | North | East | South | West | Glass |
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