I Love to Hate Your Work

Below the paywall: The second sabbatical.

Band members: “And how was it (the music)?”

Micah: “It was amazing.”

Band members: “You think we’re amazing?”

Micah: “Oh, no, I hated the music.”

Friend of the band members: “She’s trashing your music!”

Micah: “I’m not trashing their music. I said that I hated it. … I didn’t say it wasn’t good. I said that I hated it. And people hate every band.”

— from the movie “That Alien, Sound”

Even Albrecht Dürer had trouble drawing a rhinoceros without having seen one in person.

I adore drawings of exotic animals that were clearly made by someone who had never seen an elephant, giraffe or rhinoceros. The artist had drawn the animal based on someone’s description: long nose like a snake, ears like a ship’s sails, a body like an enormous grape and a tail like a piece of wee string.

To the artist, their drawing is correct. It fulfills the description. But to anyone who has seen the animal in person, the drawing doesn’t even begin to capture what an elephant looks like.

These antique animal drawings are like most modern furniture designs. The designer followed the written rules on proportion, volume, symmetry, value, color and detail/ornament. The piece should be perfect because it followed the rules faithfully. But it’s not. It sucks. Why?

Usually, the answer is that the designer hasn’t seen enough furniture. They haven’t fallen hopelessly in love with 23 cabinets, four turned bowls and a trestle table this week. They don’t have a crush (that mutates every month) on some form of ornament or door arrangement or oddball furniture form that doesn’t even exist today (armoires built like houses is my current crush).

They don’t have 30 floating furniture forms all bubbling in the back of their phone and their mind, trying to emerge through some work on the bench. Do you have a favorite moulding this week? Do you ever think about changing your entire woodworking practice after visiting an excellent museum exhibit? Is your phone filled with almost as many photos of furniture (that you didn’t build) as photos of your family or pets?

Do you have photos of colors that make your insides squirm?¹

Everyday beauty during a 12-hour period on my phone.

All the good designers I know are in love with the visual world and behave like a giant receptor. Almost anything can plug into their receptor, from the curve of a cat’s back to the layout of a door’s panels to a stone bridge.

When the information comes in, it usually gets sorted into three bins: “that’s beautiful and I love it” or “I am indifferent to that” to “it’s not beautiful and I hate that.” All three feelings are valid. But the two important ones are the ones that relate to beauty.

Let’s get this out of the way: I believe that beauty exists. It’s real. But I also believe that the bar for something to be beautiful is laughably low. Almost everything in the natural world is beautiful (unless – weirdly – it has been modified by people). Have you ever seen an ugly tree? A plant that wasn’t – when examined closely – perfectly proportioned? Or a color in nature that didn’t evoke the animal, vegetable or mineral world?

Everything that I design has a foot planted in the world around us. I’m sure it’s possible – somehow – to work outside of nature, but for me that’s like trying to see the fifth dimension. I just don’t have the equipment.

I look to trees to help me design chairs. Mountains and rock formations for cabinets. Clouds for tables. And gorgeous architecture for … everything.

No, not France. This is a gorgeous Second Empire building in Portland, Maine.

Whether you like it or not, furniture is the stepchild of architecture. Almost everything we do with our furniture is rooted in the vast architectural record. Beautiful buildings might be our species’ greatest achievement. And we are fortunate that we have an existing (and written) record of it that goes back thousands of years.

Millions of talented builders were inspired by nature, and they distilled their thoughts into structures that can be studied by anyone today simply by walking around them.

We can take their lessons and apply our own crushes with the natural world (and the built world) to make something “else” (I can’t say that we’ll make something “new”).

And then there’s the other side of the coin. The things we “hate.” I think that hate or revulsion is as important as love. It’s a valid emotional reaction. Honestly, most furniture I see today in stores provokes zero reaction in me. I am indifferent to it. It is not worth caring about.²

When I see a thing I hate, I spend time to figure out why, because this is important information.

I wish I could show you more of the things I hate. Just to prove that they exist. But I try to be sensitive to the feelings (and lawsuits) of others. Sculpture masquerading as furniture puts this into the “hate” column. Cartoonish depictions of furniture usually go there as well. There’s a “message” here: It’s a grandfather clock struggling to stand up straight. So I assume it’s about having a difficult childhood. Also, the complex knot (and walnut figure) suggest the difficulties made the person more beautiful/interesting. OK.