The Lyndale Garage was designed as both a replacement for a dilapidated stick-frame garage and an open-air addition to a single-family home on Chicago’s northwest side. Located on a standard city lot, the new two-car garage was conceived of as a podium for a new “exterior room” for the owners to host small social gatherings for friends and family. The rooftop deck was designed to facilitate casual lounging, small outdoor dinner parties and barbeques. Given its close proximity to adjacent roof decks and the elevated full southern sun exposure, an aesthetic design element – a custom CNC-milled trellis – was developed to serve as a privacy screen, solar shading mechanism, and ornamental wall texture. The patterning of the trellis was engineered to satisfy optimal manufacturing criteria while maintaining owner-required functional use parameters and amplifying the use of light and shadow as ephemeral materials to create an intimate and dynamic environment.