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@ 2008/12/16I was looking through an issue of Architectural Record one day and noticed the renderings of the Beijing Digital building which would be the technical centre of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Immediately I thought to myself “this could be a computer case”, at this point not knowing that I was actually going to build another one. When it came time to build another case, this building came immediately to mind. I showed the renderings of the building to my friend, Belgian architect, and fellow modder, Gert Swolfs and he responded by saying that he actually did the renderings and would be happy to render the case for me. These renderings are shown below.
For the design, I took the “circuit board” design on the building and transferred it onto a 30cm cube. Three sides would contain this design and the other two sides would have a movable fin design. The fins act as a “skin” (excuse the architecture lingo) that could be opened or closed depending on the heat load inside.
In order to have space for a DVD drive (or Blu-ray in the future) and a full size power supply to power the full size video card, I decided to add a second layer which would go under the original cube. The DVD drive, PSU, and most of the wiring would be housed here and the J&W Mini-ITX motherboard, AMD Radeon HD 4850 GPU, AMD Phenom X4 9350e CPU, OCZ So-DIMM DDR2 RAM and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive would be housed in the top section.
The materials were originally going to be aluminum all around but Gert suggested wood and (big surprise) I liked this idea. To go with the technology theme, I decided to use solid ebony for the cube because the jet black nature of it makes it almost not even feel like wood. The name of this case is Chiaroscuro which means light and dark. The ebony is the dark and I used curly maple for the bottom section to contrast as the light. For the skeleton inside, I chose black brushed aluminum and UV acrylic thanks to the great guys at AC Ryan.
For the design, I took the “circuit board” design on the building and transferred it onto a 30cm cube. Three sides would contain this design and the other two sides would have a movable fin design. The fins act as a “skin” (excuse the architecture lingo) that could be opened or closed depending on the heat load inside.
In order to have space for a DVD drive (or Blu-ray in the future) and a full size power supply to power the full size video card, I decided to add a second layer which would go under the original cube. The DVD drive, PSU, and most of the wiring would be housed here and the J&W Mini-ITX motherboard, AMD Radeon HD 4850 GPU, AMD Phenom X4 9350e CPU, OCZ So-DIMM DDR2 RAM and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive would be housed in the top section.
The materials were originally going to be aluminum all around but Gert suggested wood and (big surprise) I liked this idea. To go with the technology theme, I decided to use solid ebony for the cube because the jet black nature of it makes it almost not even feel like wood. The name of this case is Chiaroscuro which means light and dark. The ebony is the dark and I used curly maple for the bottom section to contrast as the light. For the skeleton inside, I chose black brushed aluminum and UV acrylic thanks to the great guys at AC Ryan.
