alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)
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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.
Oh man... I've never worked with concrete, but I would love to make a desk stand that looked like a little montréal métro station. They're all rather brutalist, and have flat tops haha
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Station_Radisson_Met...
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.
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...
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!
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.)
Looks amazing, I love it. Nice work!
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.
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.
if we give it a little more polish, colder/greyer tones and "newness," it would fit very nicely for a Control fan :)
EDIT: https://store.steampowered.com/app/870780/Control_Ultimate_E...
I'm not an art theorist but I think the decay makes it something other than brutalist IMO
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.
This is dope af. I love concrete (was just gifted a book about concrete buildings for my birthday last week). I see things like this and remind myself that I have free will.
Thanks for the inspiration.
@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.
This is cool. It's not for everyone and probably very heavy.
But I love the hacker feel of 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.
This is beautiful. Definitely beats the minimalist "cardboard box" stand. Bravo. I wouldn't want to move it though.
I certainly haven't heard of that technique to get rid of bubbles in the cement.
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.
Really solid laptop stand!
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
How much does it weigh?
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.
This is the kind of content that I come to HN for. Well done, OP. I love the product and inspiration.
Isn't the ornamental 'urban decay' detail kinda the opposite of the utilitarian and functional style of brutalism?
This is pretty cool. How much does this weigh?
I love it! I just wish I could enlarge the photos! EDIT: ah, it works to right-click open image in new tab.
Use a Keychron concrete keyboard with it .
Chalk it up to far too many hours in the Sci Li but I quite like this.
Cool project, but not brutalist
this is really cool, what a great Show HN. i will try to make one this weekend :)
There are some subtly weak desks out there, quite a few actually, where placing this on top could be brutal.
Looks awesome! I like raw concrete. Plays well with the tech around it.
A really complicated way to scratch your shiny expensive Apple device
It's too much concrete for me, but hey, not every day you see an original and unique piece like this!
And while at it… Why not a concrete laptop case?
work of art!
For a larger piece, I used a massage gun and walked around the mold hitting the sides with it. Worked out
This is so weird. I love it. Thanks for sharing!
I read every comment. What HN can be at its best.
The most obvious issue here is that there needs to be a mat on the top to avoid scratching the bottom of the laptop.
Literally just looks like some trash sitting on their desk. Well done if that's the goal?
Can't say I'm heavy into brutalist architecture and then sit on an Ikea chair
I don't like it but I like that you did it.
OK I thought this was a late April Fools until I kept scrolling.
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 sick but sad that it has to live in that open office cubicle world :[
They'll never steal it gg
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.