External Brain

After finishing his Hollyhock House and the Imperial Hotel, Frank Lloyd Wright began to push his ideas concerning patterned concrete blocks. Utilizing the textile block, Wright built four houses – La Miniatura, the Ennis House, the Freeman House and the Storer House – as a way to truly challenge himself, as he explained in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Gerald Nordland’s book, Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas, What about the concrete block? It was the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world. It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. Why not see what could be done with that gutter rat? Steel rods cast inside the joints of the blocks themselves and the whole brought into some broad, practical scheme of general treatment, why would it not be fit for a new phase of our modern architecture? It might be permanent, noble beautiful— via ArchDaily

Let’s say you get a lot of floor traffic or you have a kid that jabs Hot Wheels into the ground. Maybe you have a dog that runs in circles, and you want a strong wood floor. You’ll probably look for a high Janka number — a measure of hardness — to find something that will hold up against denting and wear. You might even consider this hardened strand woven floor from Cali Bamboo, which took home a 5,000+ pound score in recent tests — via Jetson Green

This is the bike that Wakako Togashi, designer at Hide Motorcycle, rides to work every day. It’s based on a 2002 Harley-Davidson Sportster 883R, and Wakako describes it as “very comfortable riding” — via Bike EXIF