I first got the idea from an artsy piece my wife showed me, a smoking shelter design from schindler-salmeron. It's really nice looking, but the thing that caught my attention was the simplicity of construction. Everything is essentially a box-joint with giant fingers.
So...I did some rough calculations, and I realized that this would actually be a fairly economical way of building structures. Not the cheapest, but cheaper than conventional, and helluva lot simpler in some ways.
A little more looking around showed that someone else has thought along these lines. There's no indication they followed through, but they seem to have come to the same general conclusions as I did, that this would be an affordable, durable, and sturdy-as-all-get-out building method.
Then, while pursuing my look-at-old-stuff-on-google-books addiction, I came across a 1954 Pop Sci 2-pager on 'solid wood houses' showing that, yet again, I'm years behind the times on ideas. They show a couple of different ways to use solid lumber, so some more good food for thought there.
Here's one pic from the article, showing how one guy used random lengths of lumber as 'bricks' during construction:
And, finally, I remembered I had seen furniture constructed this way, and had even bookmarked one example and forgotten about it until reminded by all of the above. There was apparently a fair amount of interest in the 1970's and 80's in butcher block-ish furniture, and at least one guy showed how to make decent looking furniture from construction-grade furniture.
That's all for this weekend...
UPDATE: the www.schindlersalmeron.com site has apparently ditched their smoking shelter design, or at least hidden the thing where I can't find it, so I changed the link to point to some other guy who, thankfully, had archived the images instead of just linking to them.
