This man poured concrete around a power strip, chemically aged copper with ammonia, rusted rebar with peroxide, faked a damaged cable for vibes, and vibrated out the air bubbles with a dildo. This is the most unhinged and delightful Show HN I've ever seen.
It's an honour just to be nominated <3
Do I like it? No. Do I want one on my desk? Absolutely not. Do I think it's even brutalist? Not in the least.
But it's still a cool as hell project. People need to do more things just because they want to, and to hell with what anyone else thinks.
It's very liberating, crafting something for yourself with no intention of selling.
Sums up my mother's sculptures, or my kids' drawings.
If it serves the artist, it served a purpose.
Personally, I have an aluminium laptop stand which makes the laptop dockable but which isn't portable or makes screen/keyboard usable (secure for cats though) and I have a portable, foldable, lightweight plastic one [1].
I also do not enjoy the idea of using the bottom of a laptop on concrete. The latter material isn't nice for scratches (and every time it is put or leaves concrete is a potential mark).
So in this case, I believe a second monitor (or larger primary one) plus a vertical laptop stand would fit in the shown office.
[1] https://nexstand.eu/collections/foldable-laptop-stands
Perhaps having a scratched up laptop matches the concrete stand.
And yet that laptop stand is not even the slightest bit slanted, one of the crucial details. I could simply take a book and put the laptop on top of that, to get the same ergonomic features. I am aware that ergonomic use is not the main point, but it would certainly not have hurt to consider that angle at least a little bit.
That would have destroyed the brutalist cred.
So many naysayers. I love it! So what if it doesn’t come from the Brut region of France and thus it’s just sparkling cement, it looks great and is clearly a labor of love.
yeah i really want to try and make something like this. I was thinking of getting some spraypaint and making it look like part of it had been tagged with graffiti. Maybe one edge is broken so it looks like something I just found. I don't have the faintest idea of architecture styles, just thinking what would look cool and contrast with polished, refined, technology like a macbook or something.
That thing looks like giant pillbox bunker.
This is awesome, one of my friends actually wanted to make a laptop top and bottom case from concrete. Thin enough it could even work but would still be heavy. Definitely very stylish.
Related: this design studio in Hungary creates a lot of concrete products, including designer bags. https://www.stylemagazin.hu/kiemelt-hir/A-het-designere-Ivan...
I wonder what the practical limit is on how thin and light you can make concrete for non-structural items? I can see someone selling concrete mugs on Etsy, for example. Maybe with clever use of fillers and thin walls you could have a version of this you could actually lift. It looks great, especially in contrast to a white IKEA-style office.
Re: decay, I regret not taking more photos of the final days of the RBS "Ziggurat": https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/stark-ph... ; at the end it had plants growing from much of the upper levels, making it look extremely Horizon Zero Dawn.
People who make concrete counter tops use a lot of fibreglass fillers to get them fairly thin but if you wanted it truly light weight you’d probably need to make it out of a dense foam and coat it with something that looks like concrete.
My bathroom is a couple mm of microcement over Schluter Kerdi-Board foam, it's fairly strong. I think it can hold a laptop no problem.
Concrete counter top mixes usually use either much smaller, or no aggregate and use more sand. The mixes resemble mortar more than concrete and they are typically a little harder and less forgiving to work with.
I've read that adding a little bit of graphene can make concrete much stronger, lighter and easy to shape, so would allow for thinner objects.
There are a lot of additives to concrete - the industry is large and has put a lot of money into research over the decades. You can read many many books on the pros and cons of different options.
oh wow that takes me back. I remember touring, i think it was Texas A&M, in HS and they showed off their "concrete canoe" to the group. This would have been in the late 1900s.. 1995 or around there.
> Maybe with clever use of fillers and thin walls you could have a version of this you could actually lift
You could likely also pour something like this out of aircrete, which would make it a lot lighter even at the same thickness
Related: Anyone know where to get that kind of keyboard in the photo? Specifically, where the number pad and arrow keys are on the left?
I've been looking and looking, but the best I can find is using a narrow keyboard with a separate number-pad only keyboard on the left. I'm in the US.
(It's better for your right shoulder to keep the mouse closer to your body like in the picture.)
The keyboard in the photo was bought from Amazon in the UK, as "Black Left-Handed Mechanical Keyboard".
I am indeed a right-handed user, which is why I want my mouse within reach on the right.
I went to https://www.keyboardco.com/ and searched for left-handed and the keyboard in the photo popped up, as well as a bunch of weirder and wonderfuler ones.
Personally I just switched to TKL keyboards (no numpad). While I did use it occasionally, it wasn't often enough to feel inconvenienced without it... All the buttons are still there after all, and if I'm already at home row, it isn't any slower.
May be worth considering too, especially if you're looking for a good keyboard with eg magnetic switches vs shitty rubberdome
Yeah I would suggest you stick some wood on your left side of your current keyboard, for a few days to see if you can adapt... I always used that space as a resting place, so having it occupied totally broke my flow.
(If I needed a numpad I would have it standing alone.. those are easy to find)
Like I said, I'm already using a separate number pad on the left.
It's easier to adapt to than than putting the mouse in my left hand!
+1 for Keychron. I have a Q5 Pro with brown switches (which is almost identical to that Q12 model) and it's one of the best keyboards I've owned.
yeah that keyboard is definitely different than what I'm accustomed to. My son pointed out that shift-2 is not '@' but '"'.
It's an English (UK) keyboard layout
Standard for a UK layout keyboard. shift-3 is £
If you like brutalism, you might also enjoy the Quake Brutalist Map Jam 3, which released last month: https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-brutalist...
My favorite map is ‘One Need Not Be a House’ by Robert Yang, which was inspired by Louis Kahn's "brick brutalism" masterpieces in Bangladesh and India, as well as contemporary level design like The Silent Cartographer. The artist writes about their process on their blog post, https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2026/01/one-need-not-be...
The map jam is standalone and uses custom assets so you don’t need a copy of Quake to enjoy it. Check the website for the ‘standalone’ variant.
Sorry for derailing! Cool laptop stand!
Neat! I was big into Quake years ago. This looks like something I could waste a weekend on.
Are these all single-player maps? Are there any that are designed for (or would at least be suitable for) 1-4 player deathmatch?
Just finished reading Masters of Doom crazy Quake is still a thing today
I do really like the fast pace of Doom Eternal and Dark Ages which you can see here I think
Was just gonna say this is a great accessory to put your computer on while playing QBJ3!
Yang also regularly writes really interesting blog posts, mostly around game design. Very much recommend keeping tabs on him.
agreed! i was reading his posts this morning on the subway and he's now a part of my RSS reader :-)
Before I was scrolling down the web, I was thinking that this guy went to any construction site and just took any good looking rubbles.
A really complicated way to scratch your shiny expensive Apple device
This looks pretty funny paired with a sleek fancy MacBook though.
You need a proper Soviet-esque workstation of a laptop to sit on that concrete block - go get yourself a nice, chunky ThinkPad T530.
They'll never steal it gg
At first I thought you were talking about an actual rotating fan, which would be an awesome addition to this. Just a small PC fan running at a very low RPM built into the side in a circular cutout, with that worn metal patina look.
as a control fan, i agree. the art direction in that game is something else.
> I was delighted to see that a sequel is coming
the sequel trailer got me into the first game, actually :)) and I'm already sold on these recursive pigeons. is it multiplicative resonance?
> all-time best level design
well, the only worthy contenders are DEATHLOOP and Dishonored 2 :>
but yeah, Remedy does deserve every award they got with Control
My favorite video game of the universe.
This is pretty cool looking, I like it, it must be really heavy though.
> For a medium-sized piece like this, a vibrating dildo is actually the best thing to use. Just think of it like any other power tool.For a medium-sized piece like this, a vibrating dildo is actually the best thing to use. Just think of it like any other power tool.
I used work on foundations for warehouses, huge concrete blocks as anchor points and this is exactly how we got the bubbles out, we had a huge metal vibrator they call them high-frequency concrete pokers.
Felt a little silly doing the work, but to be fair it did get the bubbles out.
The contrast between raw industrial material and polished tech is what makes it work. There's something satisfying about building things purely for yourself with no product roadmap attached, the "dildo for air bubbles" detail alone proves this wasn't designed by committee
@dang, I'm not sure what's changed with the Show HN lately, but it's been much more lovely to read. Thank you for whatever changes which were made.
I'm glad to hear you liked the post!
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/show , it's definitely no longer a raw feed of show HN: from /new.
It's not clear what the change is, whether it is curation by hand or some other metrics, but it's a positive change, the old Show HN was getting flooded, as recently discussed. ( Although I can't work out how to find that discussion. )
Huge and positive change from the old “Show HN: Another vibe coded filesystem that I won’t even use but it was done with an LLM!”
I asked for a monitor stand at work, back in the day. No money! So I went to the loading dock, found a wooden pallet for the little AC units we installed in racks, put that on my desk. Voila - monitor stand.
I certainly haven't heard of that technique to get rid of bubbles in the cement.
Vibration? Thought it was pretty common.
The article does mention a very specific choice of vibration equipment.
Same method though. There's a plethora of vibrating things to choose from. I suppose you could mold a large silicone tentacle to put on a jackhammer, too, and use that to fish for bubbles in your cement soup. Call the tool what you want, you haven't changed the method.
Yes, I did feel a bit silly buying and using it, but to be fair it did get the bubbles out.
I've seen people use the same technique and tooling for resin pours.
This is the kind of content that I come to HN for. Well done, OP. I love the product and inspiration.
If you want to get a feel of what brutalist architecture is like up close, go to the Barbican in london if you can.
Its quite surreal. Very much in-your-face concrete exposure. Yet, to walk and experience it with your eyes is a study of contrasts: a giant, comparitively modern, greenhouse, has a glass roof open to the sky and yet many floors have no light or windows at all. And in the outdoor spaces, like the fountain/canal running through the complex the concrete will sort of be in the background and lets you focus on everything else: the water, the swans and the people around.
Juxtapose that to low hanging exposed concrete roofs and walls in closed passages could make one feel constrained/claustrophobic/yearning for light.
The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction. The term brutalist refers to béton brut, which means raw concrete. I.e. you can see the shape of the wooden slats used as a cast. The concrete in the Barbican was finished by drilling to create a dappled pattern, which obliterated the shape of the slats.
There are also lots of post modern elements. For example, the columns of the girl’s school have pyramids at the top to resemble pencils.
The south bank has more buildings that are a purer expression of brutalism.
> The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction.
Brutalism grew out of the post war rebuilding period. Wikipedia[1] lists it as Brutalist - while not an authority in all things it seems supported to me.
As well given the significant news [2] of this morning, I'm curious if we might see a growth/wave of Brutalist construction in the nearish future.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Centre
2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47674286
If you find yourself in West London, also check out Brunel University, all of the older buildings are pure brutalism
I don't like it but I like that you did it.
It can't be a good idea to condition yourself to be comfortable around an exposed wire that's near to a real power socket.
fair point. gotta trust that everything is properly hooked up and won't shift.
you'll only know when you find out the hard way
I guess "I poured some concrete into a mold and put a power outlet in it" wouldn't be as eye catching of a title.
This is one of those things where someone does something incredibly simple, but dresses it up in pretty language and even some totally irrelevant chemistry equations (because they r so smrt) to make it look like more than it is. Which LLM did you paste the equation from?
And of course those who also have no idea how anything is made are unbelievably impressed. You can tell by the amount of exclamation points in all of the toxically positive reactions. Good work in that respect!
But hey, I guess it's not another vibe coded project with an LLM writeup. Progress.
I have not done much with concrete, but I have made lots of things out of many other materials over the years, and in general I have found that making things - and making them come out the way you want them - is never as simple as it looks. "Reality has a surprising amount of detail", it was once wisely written:
http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
This project is not to my personal taste but I respect the work which went in to it, and I'm glad its creator got what he wanted.
love the brutalist vibe of this. concrete is such an underrated material for desk setups. It looks way more premium than the plastic xD
This is cool. It's not for everyone and probably very heavy.
But I love the hacker feel of it.
Cool project, but not brutalist
this is really cool, what a great Show HN. i will try to make one this weekend :)
Isn't the ornamental 'urban decay' detail kinda the opposite of the utilitarian and functional style of brutalism?
Yes, Sam is probably just having a bit of fun here, but I think it's worth presenting brutalism correctly as it's often so misunderstood.
Concrete is simply the mass production medium of the time, many of the patterns and moulds used in Barbican for example feature pretty timber imprints, scalloping patterns, painstakingly pick-hammered textured panels, or pleasing swooping shapes.
Further there is always space for glass, brass, Terrazzo and lighting.
Sam's design does feel cold, unnatural and broken, definitely not what brutalist living is about.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/feb/22...
https://www.structuralrenovations.co.uk/portfolio/barbican-e...
https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/barbican-story/construction...
> cold, unnatural and broken, definitely not what brutalist living is about.
This can often be the actual experience of it, though. Part of why it's so divisive. Personally I'm on the "looks great, wouldn't want to actually live there" side.
The Barbican is an example of how good it can be when properly maintained by a community. There are plenty of less prestigious examples where the community cheered their demolition.
My subjective appreciation of building materials depends essentially on how gracefully they age. I find that concrete does not age well... and dislike brutalism for this specific reason.
Most brutalism was never intended to last. It was intended to be a quick/cheap answer to get people acceptable housing in the cities. Then they would build something nicer for people to live in as the economy gets richer. Which is why it so often is associated with decay these days - the structure still stands, but it has outlasted the expected lifespan.
There are burtalism structures that were intended to be beautiful and last. They do that well (well beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but the majority was quick and cheap above all else.
Yes I had the same thought.
Imo brutalism is monolithic and unyielding. This is opposite, with the sturdy concrete yielding into plant overgrowth and exposed rebar.
My understanding of brutalism is that it’s an extreme interpretation of “function over form”. The most brutalist laptop stand would be a cardboard box turned upside down, not a slightly impractical block of concrete carefully manufactured to evoke a certain aesthetic.
For a larger piece, I used a massage gun and walked around the mold hitting the sides with it. Worked out
looks like trash. congratulations man
And while at it… Why not a concrete laptop case?
OK I thought this was a late April Fools until I kept scrolling.
This is so weird. I love it. Thanks for sharing!
I imagine its good on heat disipation...
Literally just looks like some trash sitting on their desk. Well done if that's the goal?
I love it, although if you're not into urbex or didn't grow up with brutalist architecture (soviet union, east germany, even parts of Zurich downtown) I guess in that case you don't really have anything to tie it to and without that connection it just looks like a piece of junk.
Chalk it up to far too many hours in the Sci Li but I quite like this.
There are some subtly weak desks out there, quite a few actually, where placing this on top could be brutal.
There are some subtly weak floors out there, where placing such a desk could be fatal.
The funny thing is that in the 21st century, concrete can be quite light.
Well, there were people that made light concrete on the 20th century too. But not it's accessible to anybody.
Never mind placing it, bringing it to the place where it should be, er, placed might also be a challenge. Unless you can drive a forklift into your office...
I took it to the office on a little trolley thing
I didn't mean the laptop stand, I meant the concrete desk one of the parent comments suggested...
how much does it weigh? it looks like maybe 20-30lbs
Turtles all the way down.
I've seen quite a few blog posts of "old door on breeze blocks", the canonical brutalist/abandoned warehouse desk.
Next up: structural engineering assessment of my office floor
Can't say I'm heavy into brutalist architecture and then sit on an Ikea chair
I love it! I just wish I could enlarge the photos!
EDIT: ah, it works to right-click open image in new tab.
Is that surface concrete? Will it scratch the laptop?
My laptop has little rubber feet, so it dosn't scratch on its underside. But yes, the piece is solid concrete, so you wouldn't want to bash anything fragile against it.
ok, it's stable (at least from the photos), but I would prefer a more lightweight approach
Looks like a rat hideout.
This is sick but sad that it has to live in that open office cubicle world :[
Looks awesome! I like raw concrete. Plays well with the tech around it.
my annoying ass coworker has one of these, he keeps trying to migrate us to raw sql and C
That's one way to prevent people from taking your desk at work
I'm waiting for the man to make a laptop case out of concrete. That will be truly brutalist!
I had to wheel the stand into the office on a trolley, I'm not making a laptop case lol
More Industrial interior design than brutalist architecture
Such a heavy stand might serve as a nice heat sink too, I would think. Doesn't have fins, but it could radiate evenly, and not even get that hot.
We need to see a benchmark with a Macbook air during extended workload.
Is it just me or can you all hear the sound of the metal/aluminum scratching against the concrete?
Loved the brutalist movie, this actually seems quite nice assthetically.
try playing Control then! that's your dream come true :) (well, maybe except the Hiss part)
You just need to cover it with graffitis to fully depict the experience of the poor souls living in brutalist buildings.
The author mentions urban decay and dilapidation multiple times and very clearly worked that into the design here
I don't like it, from a pure brutalistic view point this obviously doesn't make any sense, it isn't practical and it doesn't make any effort to create a shape that is esthetically pleasing. The urban decay is even more outrageous, the whole appeal of urban decay is that it is "real", it's the thinking about all of people that went through the same structure throughout the years. Of cause it doesn't mean you can't make art about or featuring urban decay, but you have to be smart about it.
> this obviously doesn't make any sense
That's debatable, but it's a moot point; it's pastiche, so it doesn't have the same goals or motivations as the original.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche
Exactly. This is more like the pre-ripped jeans version of brutalism.
Something that would be useful in my case is a monitor stand stand. Does anyone know why almost no current monitor can be raised so that the upper edge is at eye level? Is it due to incompetence among the current breed of designers? Quite a few of my colleges have a stack of books beneath the monitor stand.
Law suits / claims, I'd expect, as tall is unstable.
If I sell a Monitor With Really Tall Monitor Stand and then you lightly bump your desk and break your monitor, you might want a replacement and call my stand "an unstable PoS".
If I sell you a Monitor and you stack books under it and your monitor falls... well... dummy, tall stuff falls over. Time to buy a new monitor.
Isn't the manufacturer to blame if I get neck problems then?
Try getting “Enterprise” monitors like Dell UltraSharp or HP EliteDisplay. Not they only come with better feet (height adjustable & pivoting), they are calibrated and have really good panels which you can stare at for hours without fatigue.
Many monitor arms on gas struts have extended range and this is no problem. Ergotron was one of the first
Monitor arms are cheap enough and better than a stand. Clamp the arm to an edge and you can put things under the monitor, plus put the monitor where you want it.
Whether this monitor stand was decayed through history or artificially makes no difference if he's compelled by the elements of decay that he's replicating. You can get angry over design philosophy or you can just appreciate that this man crafted something with a very unique aesthetic.
It’s unfortunate that brutalism has become synonymous with “crumbling concrete”. That was certainly not the intention of the brutalist architects, but rather a side effect of the poor quality of the (sometimes experimental) concrete mixtures. 21st century (neo-)brutalist buildings won’t suffer from this.
Now I need to make a concrete laptop
This is quite tasteless… a betrayal of brutalist honesty. And the dildo thing is plainly disgusting. Let’s all be gentlemen and keep that sort of thing off the Net.
First day on the Internet huh?
Should have stolen a broken piece of concrete off a street and repurpose it to be a laptop stand. At least that would be authentic, and contributing to urban decay at his location.
Also known as an inertial mass dampener for your sit-stand desk.
I appreciate++ the design except for the too-perfect rebar and the exposed wire directly _in_ the concrete. Pros would use a conduit methinks.
The conduit is a good idea. I'm working on a Raspberry Pi stand in leather and walnut right now. Think I'm going to incorporate that somehow
I love concrete as a medium but that's got to be heavy af and I would manage to smack my elbow on it all the time as well as smash my coffee mug on it.
Yeah, getting it into the office was non-trivial!
When I first look at this I think "hey it would be nicer if it wasn't falling apart", but you could argue that's kind of the point. Well done
I've always loved this style of architecture. People think commie blocks are ugly but I've always appreciated their simple utilitarianism
Well, from the look of it, to touch the thing wrong must be its own punishment, which is brutalism indeed. It insists on itself far too loudly, though, in what I would call a pseudapocalypticist or "Falloutpunk" manner. Too bad. There's nothing much wrong with it for its own sake, other than the ergonomy, but it sticks out from its environment like a sore thumb, adding nothing of value save the demand its presence be flattered and celebrated for its own sake - you know what? I take it back; you've not only recapitulated the brutalist concept, but apotheosized it. Congratulations on a successful work! It must have been a blast to build, which is where the real joy always is to be found of course, and I look forward to seeing which school of design you satirize next.
(Did you really immure a power strip in cement? The MOVs in those are wearing items, you know, and can though rarely do fail short circuit...)
go visit any major “third world” country city … probably see those everywhere.
