I find a distinct joy in furniture that is really simple. Stupid simple. Mostly in the sense of materials and construction.
To bring this back to last week, I like furniture that is "legible" in as much as it is honest about its materials and demonstrates some of its manufacturing. This both makes me feel closer to the raw materials (celebrating some primitivism) and more willing to modify it to fit my needs. (i.e. if I can see how it was made, I'm more willing to take it apart and to modify confidently.) I also just appreciate budget, ingenuity, and creative recycling.
(Aside: some of the side effects of machine learning-driven design will be increasing illegibility in form and manufacturing process to humans. I think Morgan gave me this thought. But a consumer-side illegibility is already happening through complexity and proprietary maintenance. The black-boxing of car functionality, for instance—or really anything that works agains the right to repair.)
At the fun and low-brow end of simple furniture, there's a genre I call "home depot furniture"—that which you can make with a single trip to your local church of the 2x4, Home Depot.
To bring this back to last week, I like furniture that is "legible" in as much as it is honest about its materials and demonstrates some of its manufacturing. This both makes me feel closer to the raw materials (celebrating some primitivism) and more willing to modify it to fit my needs. (i.e. if I can see how it was made, I'm more willing to take it apart and to modify confidently.) I also just appreciate budget, ingenuity, and creative recycling.
(Aside: some of the side effects of machine learning-driven design will be increasing illegibility in form and manufacturing process to humans. I think Morgan gave me this thought. But a consumer-side illegibility is already happening through complexity and proprietary maintenance. The black-boxing of car functionality, for instance—or really anything that works agains the right to repair.)
At the fun and low-brow end of simple furniture, there's a genre I call "home depot furniture"—that which you can make with a single trip to your local church of the 2x4, Home Depot.
I developed a bit of a mythology around Home Depot while working at the BDW. I didn't have a car and they were outside of my typical radii in Providence, so getting to a one always felt just out of arm's reach. Most contractors in America know their local Home Depot blindfolded, so the brand accepts a workaday attitude while also catering to the suburban dad trying to find time for handy projects at home.
While working at an open-access woodshop I saw many projects in this latter category, coming in with a fresh batch of wood, new boxes of screws, and bright eyes. A lot of our job, as shop managers/monitors, was to readjust expectations of the fidelity of woodwork one can do with zero training. The BDW benefits from a lot of "project cruft" that accumulates from these frequently dead-in-the-water projects, which turn into a healthy stream of loose, ready-to-use materials for people who stick around. This experience of the pristine, straight-from-the-store materials that waste away in the shuffle of amateur construction is what I was trying to get at in my piece for NYCxSkymall.
There's a contextual fit that emerges from furniture assembled with the materials on-hand in an intuitive way, rather than through fresh materials and a master plan. This is some of the joy of Michael Wolf's Bastard Chairs series, where each the jerry-rigged seats share so much character in frugality, haste, or patina.
An aquarium store in Northeast LA was populated with milk crates with bits of plywood bolted (or zip-tied) on top. Perfect for both watching fish and reaching the higher shelves.
Look at this lamp by Skye. A bag, a stick, a bulb, and a wire. Why anything more? Who gives a shit!
The LEGO community used the term "kindergartenization" to refer, in a derogatory way, to LEGO pieces that were manufactured to provide simpler building experiences. Kindergartenized pieces could often be approximated by assembling a few pre-existing smaller pieces. Sure, they make make the building experience easier for your 5-year-old. Is ease of experience the goal? Why not allow them to find a way to assemble the necessary shape from multiple, smaller pieces? (choking hazard risks aside...) Again, this is a sort of romantic primitivism—to seek out a simple form made of platonic pieces. I think of this any time I go camping: the desire for shelter boils down to the need to find a good cave or a good tree. Similarly, if I were to sit down and design a bench, I'd start thinking about dimensions, materials, ways to manufacture, roles it can serve in a room other than just "bench." But any time I go camping and need a place to relax, I just sit on a fucking log.
Don't get my wrong: fully-fleshed, precision-made furniture is also amazing. There's a part of me that wishes I studied furniture in college, to be able to make the objects that work at the interface of human and architectural scales. I am lucky to have some friends who do amazing things (1, 2, 3, 4), and I'd love to follow more contemporary designers.
Max Lamb's work is a recurring visit for me. I imagine he might share the feeling that the most intuitive chair in the world is a small granite outcrop on a hill.
Lost in Home Depot,
Lukas