Holton Rower spotted this amazing image on henk nouwens flickr. It is titled ‘The Cantilevered Void House’ and accompanied by these words:

“Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their color.” Cantilevered structures self-supported over the void. From: The Gormenghast Novels.

Who knows what the story is, whether the house is real or fake? Is it a fantastical image from The Gormenghast Novels? Comments on the flickr page yielded no info* but lead us to a tove of images at The Cantilever Project, which got us thinking about cantilevers:  A projecting structure, such as a beam, that is supported at one end and carries a load at the other end or along its length.

We’re smitten with this simple cantilever plywood chair (tiny angle braces clearly showing…could we diy this?)

That got us mulling cantilevered household items like Mies van der Rohe‘s “Weissenhof” cantilever chair, whose essential shape has been copied endlessly:

We’re looking around our place, and life,  through cantilever eyes.

*UPDATE: a reader reverse-search the image and traced it to this source. It is REAL.

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d-i-y: cracking the code of a donald judd table