The Planet Miller

[Image: The "Voronoi Shelf" and "Extruded Chair" by Marc Newsom; image by Lamay Photo, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, NYC].

In a recent post on gravestmor we read about the furniture of Marc Newsom. Every table, chair, and bookshelf Newsom designs has been individually milled "from a single slab of marble from the same Carrara quarry" – so there are no hinges and no joinery.

[Image: A "lathed marble table" by Marc Newsom; image by Lamay Photo, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, NYC].

"I think that if this proves anything," Marcus at gravestmor writes, "it is that it is clear now that it was a mistake to build the Beijing Olympic Stadium in steel" – after all, he says, "carving the whole thing out a single piece of marble would have, in hindsight, been the correct choice."

[Images: Two "extruded" tables by Marc Newsom; image by Lamay Photo, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, NYC].

Alternatively, you could take several dozen CNC-milling machines – like the ones that Newsom used – and disappear into the Rocky Mountains. Alone.
Over the course of a decade, you mill every single peak in northwestern Colorado into an elaborate cobweb of arches and shelves, weird nets of rock that stand thousands of feet above the horizon. You mill gentle slides and curves, nesting one into the other across counties – huge, gyroscopic spans bending down through the mountain air. Then, a few miles away, you begin work on a new town that no one else knows about, complete with churches, homes, and a small planetarium, ground and polished straight from the exposed surface of the earth. On quiet nights, the wind hums across doorsills...
Everyday, fifty years from now, at sunset, in a village called Lumière, a new kind of cinema begins: huge, moving shadows creep across the landscape, dragging east against the falling of the sun. Golden light casts like a laser through complex shapes milled decades earlier.
People sit in lawn chairs, watching, stunned.

(Vaguely related: On the geotechnical invasion of paradise and Milled landscapes – though that second link is pretty old).