When I plan out a piece of vernacular furniture to build, I rarely create a construction drawing. I also avoid using architectural principles such as whole-number ratios – at least consciously.
Instead, during the last 20 years I have developed a way of making chairs that derives from both seeing and memory. It stems from an approach I honed in 1992 when I was sure I was going to be shit-canned.
In the early 1990s, Lucy and were newspaper journalists in South Carolina. We each made $325 a week in salary before taxes and were paid every two weeks. So almost every other Thursday our checking account’s balance slipped below $50.
We couldn’t make any mistakes with money. And we couldn’t lose our jobs.
Factual errors get you fired. Sometimes it takes one big mistake. Other times you get canned after making several in short succession.
I had made four errors during a few weeks of work. And no matter how careful I was, it seemed that every story I wrote contained a blunder that required a printed correction.
After my fourth error, I was ashamed to enter the newsroom. Each morning I climbed the stairwell to the second floor and mustered the courage to open the fire door to the newsroom and the 50 sets of eyes in there.
I slinked to my desk. I tried to come up with a plan to keep my job.
In the end, I changed the way I worked. I had to write at the same, almost-uncontrollable speed as before. But I got ferocious about facts. I went over my stories word by word and asked: Is this word right? Will anyone object to it? Or can I simply eliminate the word from the sentence?
Adverbs and adjectives disappeared from my writing. My stories got shorter and shorter. But they managed to say everything necessary. I became a lover of verbs and short declarative sentences.
My writing style was borne out of desperation to survive.
I often think of that time as I make a vernacular chair. The people who built these chairs were – at best – weeks or days away from starvation. The chairs they made were for their family or sold to members of the community. And when you study the chairs up close, you see an economy of action in the materials, shapes and joints they used.
Cracks in the seat were positioned between mortises. Bent sticks were rotated to hide defects or to accentuate their curve or bend. Arms were made from branches, and literally any material could fill in the voids in the assembled arm.
So here’s Design Rule No. 1: Don’t fuss over a chair or its individual components. Work with the materials you have and find a way to exploit them to their fullest. This is not permission to be sloppy. Shit chairs fall apart or need constant repair. Do your best work at speed. Defects and errors should be embraced or minimized.
Here’s the other conclusion I made: These chairmakers were not imitating high-style pieces from the city. There are no cabriole-leg stick chairs that I know of. Or shield seats. Or backs in the shape of a Roman vase or wagon wheel. These chairmakers had their own language and (based on the similarities I have seen across cultures and time) they were imitating common items around them.
Their design vocabulary sprung from the wooden objects in their village – the houses, farming implements, wagons, tools and other pieces of furniture owned by neighbors.
To develop my design language, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time studying old work: photos, pieces in furniture museums or open-air museums and books. So many books.
When I look at old forms, I seek two things:
1. Beautiful forms. These are pieces that are proportioned well and have a grace to them. A chair might be too ornate for my taste. Or be garishly painted. But the form is right. When I design a “new” chair, I usually think of one form as I build. I don’t keep a photo of the chair before me. Instead, I try to hold the memory of it in the front of my mind.
2. Interesting details. Disassemble every piece in your head. Legs, arms, sticks, hands, combs, stretchers, seats. When I look at a piece, I isolate these and make notes of what I like. An ugly chair can have beautiful hands, or an interesting arm. Ooh, I like the way the legs transition from octagonal to round at their tenons. I want to make legs like that someday.
Design Rule No. 2: Create a mental encyclopedia of forms and details that inspire you. Keep these in your head and turn them over and over. Try to join one to another in your head while you bored – standing in line at the grocery or driving to work.
If this sounds difficult, you are correct. It’s a monumental chore. The reason it’s difficult is that it’s hard to train our eyes to see beautiful forms or remember gorgeous details. When at a museum, I’m lucky to get 30 minutes of intense concentration. Then my brain glosses over everything because of information overload.
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