--So, whadaya got here?
--Who, me?
--Well, yeah . . .unless those clamps along the wall  can carry on a conversation.
--Oh, it's just another gate.  A rectangle, more or less.
--With a question mark in the center?
--I put that there. . . just now.
--And a rubber mallet and a folding rule and just about the biggest hand plane I've ever seen.
--A joiner's plane.  My grandfather's.  The folding rule I've had since junior high school. 
--So it's a rectangle then.  Not  much else to say, really.
--No, I guess not, 'cept it's clear vertical-grain fir.  A nice dense and durable wood with lovely geometrically vertical grain and what's in my head with this gate reminds me of school.  My mother was an art major at the University of Illinois and she had convinced me I should do the same and there were these live model classes and while everyone else is painting the live models I repeatedly painted instead these geometric configurations of interwoven lines and intersecting planes that had no resemblance whatsoever to nudity or the human form until finally one of my instructors kindly suggested perhaps I was better suited for architecture or design. 
--Interesting, sort of.  Was he right?
_Sort of.  Those in the art dept had hands that were never clean--forever smeared with graphite or charcoal or oils, while those in architecture were all fussbudgets who washed their hands before approaching the drafting board and who among them, collectively, had the originality, if compared to the art students, of a fence post.  This was 1969, mind you, and the cultural protocols were being turned upside down and while my art acquaintances were at the forefront of this change, my architecture constituents and their slide-rules were clueless, arriving to class in button-down shirts and slacks and wing-tip shoes.  My art friends embedded themselves with tie-dye clothes and bongs and Led Zeppelin while my architecture pals--and they were all males--belonged to fraternities and went to keg parties.
--So what happened? 
--Nothing happened.  It's not a story. I'm just providing some background on the geometry of the gate. 
--So it's an anecdote then.  Not a story, with a punch line.
--It's life. 
--It's a story with no ending.
--It's a life lived and how it's less the product of one's life than their life itself.  The life as art, fully witnessed by no one else but those who live it.
--Huh?
--Well anyway, in my head with this gate is the repeating geometry of my live model paintings.  First this, then we'll have a look and see what embellishments might be in order.  But no gluing.  Nothing gets glued.  Once we glue, I'm working from recovery mode.  Dry fits only this time.
--All right then.  Let's have a further look.

We lay a few cross-rails in place to see how it looks and it looks like a ladder.  A wide ladder.  Or an oversized wall vent.  But it's a good start to a clean unfettered design born from a block-and-tackle vision of 90-degree angles and flush-jloined intersections.

Setting a few verticals in place and at least we no longer have a ladder. 

Laying out the grid patterns as a half-lap joint and utilizing the spacer block on the left for the first pass, and then removing it to insure the same repeating width with each dado.  A technique that always invites daydreaming but the slight confusion of the grids interlocking, or weaving and how this annoying detail invariably ignites an error, a lapse in attention, and the do-overs that result.  

--I just dont get it with you and that sledgehammer.
--What dont you get? 
--Is it s'posed to be funny, or for real? 
--Oh it's real.  The real deal.
--Tantrums are immature.
--The juxstaposition of the hammer's heel has for me an intriguing appeal and how a little subtle urging has the grids a'merging.
--Just cut to the line, and you'll have yer design. 
--A line is devine, unless they intertwine . . . and we miss the line and must resign to the decline of the glorious hammer as a shrine.
--A shrine to your childish embilcility.
--I've known you for what . . . 50-some years now?  Yer like this concrete cinder block, who wont go away. 
--I'm a part of you. Like the sledgehammer, only the better part.
--Yer a line man is all.  Lines upon lines all lined up for a legacy of misaligned alignments.  I happen to like my hands smeared with graphite and charcoal and paint and gripping the handle of something as catastrophic as a sledgehammer.
--I'd invite you to a kegger this weekend, but honestly, you wouldn't fit in.
--Beat it.
--I like my hands clean and my nails trimmed and cradling something such as the expected expectations of a slide rule.
--Along with your wingtips?
--No one wears wingtips anymore.
--Well anyway, this is all for a while.  I've got a few business fires to put out and some projects to oversee in LA and some golf to be played in the foothills.
--Right.  Will I be coming along?
--I reckon so. 

It dawns on Prowell to stain the edges of the grid dividers before assembly, thus avoiding the danger of smearing the eventual rods with daunting oils that will certainly affect their reflective actions against the sunlight.
--Rods?  Reflective actions?  What's the point?
--You again. 
--Well it's not like I have anywhere to go. And as long as I'm here, you do understand, I assume, that there is virtually no one out there who appreciates that sort of thing.  Rods 'n all.
--Probably not. 
--So why bother.  Just give them what they want.  Jeeze, it's not rocket science. 
--The CPW shops.  That's their job.  I don't actually have a job, unless this might be considered . . .

Considering the rods, which, seemingly, no one appreciates but Prowell, who appears transfixed, or bemused, or simply seeing them, picturing them as they might appear in the late afternoon and the early morning on a clear bright day. 

The first course of grid dividers glued and clamped, with the rods fitted into place prior to the assembly.  The grid itself will have a interlocking weave, with each horizontal grid divider alternating above and below the verticals in a design that may or may not be noticeable.  Possibly like an impressionist painting, in that the full affect arrives by standing back and viewing it from a distance.

The rest of the 'under' horizontal grid dividers glued and clamped into place.  And while this is undertaken, what is it that occupies his mind?  A wandering mind, thinking of critters and the families of critters that have shared the site for 24 years and starting with the fat bulbous Carpenter's Bees that have lived in a hole in the shop rafters and how long does a carpenter bee live? How many generations is it that have shared the space, minding one another's personal space.  And then the raccoons who live under the backyard shed and how if you go into the backyard on a moonless night and sit quietly, they will come toddling out from under the shed, the entire family, and make their way to the top of the shed to access the blackberries and then down the shed and across the patio to the grapevines and now, this spring, before blackberries and grapes, the daddy has taken to sleeping in the lilies below the grapevines, waiting.  And how long do raccoons lives and how many generations of this same lineage have shared this site with the Prowells.  And then the Opossums who live under the neighbor's garage backed against the property and how they make their way in the night to the front porch to help themselves to the Prowell's cat-food bowls and how they have been doing this for decades and how long do Opossums live and how many generations of this same lineage has been living so comfortably under the neighbor's garage and is anything as ugly as an Oppossum?  These thoughts, of the critters, while fitting and gluing and clamping our Geometry Gate.

A slab of teak.  From this we'll fashion something to fill the noticeable vacancy left open in the grids. 
--We?
--Me.  You've never made anything, in all these years.
--I'm the mover, not the maker.The mover and the shaker.  If it weren't for me, pal, you've starve.
--If it weren't for me, you'd starve.
--Truce. You've got ahold of some teak.  Is this where your fun begins?  The tangents that make it impossible for me to take this company into seven-figure revenues?

From the slab of teak, the dry assembly of a tight grid, illustrating the interlocking weave that mirrors the larger interlocking weave of the gate itself.

--There's so much to be done.  I need you on any number of fronts.  Miami is running into design snags and Chicago, the Oak Park one, is suddenly behaving like kids in a candy store wanting to accessorize everything and folks wanting the new pavillion but where is the new pavilion?  Is it ready yet, Mr No-Show?
--I've been busy.  Assembling the Geometry Gate to what we have below.
--Busy?  Well,  of course . . . you've been busy.
--Right, for an hour or two a day.  When there's time.
--Look. I need you to put this silly thing aside and get back to the business.  People are beginning to, well, you know . . . talk.  I'm tired of covering for you.  Someone asked me yesterday if you actually existed, or were just a figurehead, like Betty Crocker.
--I was looking at old photos yesterday.
--What?
--Old photos.
--I heard you. 
--There was one of you, in college, sucking up to Dr Radke, our Architectural Trig professor.  Remember him?
--We got an A in that class, in case you've forgotten.
--But here's the thing:  I found another photo taken just a few months later.
--That would be when you jumped ship.  The same thing you're doing now, again.
--But where did it lead us?
--Talk about sucking up; you dont know how painful it was watching you with Buckminster Fuller--buying into all that new age crap. 
--There were perks.
--Perks?
--Dee DuCharme's open-minded hemline and how that got me to thinking about her to-die-for-legs and how the Pavillion is mostly, once you've approached it, all about the eye-level posts and the real business, the design, sort of crescends to the upper roofline and the gridded inserts, lofted above eye-level like an out-of-reach pinatta.
--And . . .
--So it ocurred to me that the 8x8 posts have all the elegance of a sumo wrestler and what we need there are the CPW columns, not posts, and so I sketched it up last night. 
--Whooppee! 
--So you can make the arrangements for Oak Park, and then Miami and get us a ticket to Donizetti's il esir de amour playing at the Chicago Lyric.
--Oh.  That's the one withn the stupid duet?
--Right.  Not even the memory of Dee DuCharms legs moves me like that opera.
--Whatever.   So how's the geomoetry gate coming.  Is this it?  Is it finished?
--Hardly.  This is our blank.  Now we'll turn to Phase 2. 
--Oh gawd.  And what is it exactly we plan to do with this, and the Free-Form gate?
--Someone will write in, eventually.  They always do.  They'll hit the Comment link below and make an offer and if it's the right site, the right setting, it's theirs.
-- Any offer?
--Pretty much.  If the site is right.  The photo-op.  The surrounding architecture must be a good fit.
-- What do I tell the accounting department?
--Tell them Betty Crocker lives.

But first we'll take a look at the rods.  Once again, we can expect a secondary reward to these rods when exposed to the direct sunlight.  Depending on a southern exposure and the progressing arc of the sun, the rods will illuminate, or back-light, in a succession to the sun's tragectory.  The time it takes to pass from the rods on the right of the gate to those on the left should be about 15 minutes, and something of a conversational piece in itself.  The same timetable between those rods in the upper half of the gate and those in the lower, with the upper illuminating for sunsets and the lower illuminating first for sunrises.  In theory, at least.

Integrity Pins.  Joining the stiles to the rails are large floating tenons, and as an insurance to the integrity of these tenons, we bore for the illustrated wenge pins that disallow the joint's disintegration.  Of course the joint doesn't need them and will last forever on its own merit, but the pins are fun and departing from the normal pin aesthetics by being square instead of round.

Turning to the open blank finally and composing a tight grid in teak, cornered by four wenge studs. The grid itself interlocks, or weaves in the same pattern as the primary grid dividers of the gate itself.  One course under and the next, over. 

Two small reddish acrylic plates and two translucent yellow, mirroring the same patterning direction as the placement of the doameter rods in the primary grid and all of it orienting the eye toward what will be the rectangular plate of the bronze latch.

Showing the teak grid in proportion to the larger primary grid.

Marching along, and in defiance of those of you who are thinking: Enough already!  Leave it be!  
Which brings us back to the wagon trains left in Ohio. To those who opted for Ohio, it no doubt made for an existence that was an improvement from wherever they began, or they wouldn't have begun the journey in the first place.  But adventure is a progressive heirarchy and those forging through the Rockies have not given a thought to Ohio since passing through Ohio. 

Anyway . . .
Here we have a series of interconnecting pencil lines, barely visible.  In the coming days, these will be inlaid with a West System epoxy pour, tinted with a translucent red dye for an effect that, although not luminescent, nevertheless striking.

Right about now we're beginning to wonder if we shouldn't have stayed in Ohio.  Air bubbles continue to foul the plan.

Because the first pour developed a few unexpected air bubbles, the process was repeated from the start, carefully working the expoxy throughout the set-up to avoid any air bubbles. 

One of four hand-rubbed coats of finish.  Applied liberally and allowed to sit for ten minutes and then wiped dry. 

  As with the Free-Form gate, photographing the rods to exemplify the affect of the  sunlight will require an uncluttered background, at the right time of day, coupled with the issue of shooting into the light.  For this specialty shot, we will use Michelle Montalbano, orchestrating the setting and the sunlight to achieve what we hope is the desired affect.