Cart House is a storage container for grocery carts for a local market in Ann Arbor, MI. The goal was to both shelter the carts and patrons and to enliven the space in front of the store. The cart is the one object (other than the groceries themselves) that the customer touches in the store; the Cart House is meant to add as much affect as possible to the otherwise quite banal experience of selecting a shopping cart. The aluminum structure is clad with local Ash wood anywhere the body or a cart comes into contact. The aluminum panels are angled to filter space, light, and vision through the object; each is custom fabricated and unique–responding to the variation in the structure itself.
This was a design-build project where we fabricated the entire project ourselves. The aluminum framed structure is parametric, even though the mixture of tools used slipped in and out of the realm of the digital or computational (mostly various saws and a welder). We worked in between digital models and the object itself by constructing a series of jigs that allowed for variations in the parameters of the elements themselves (like length, angle, etc). In this project there was little distinction between modes of production–digital and analog.
