{"id":8908,"date":"2021-10-04T09:20:21","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T13:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/?p=8908"},"modified":"2021-10-04T09:20:23","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T13:20:23","slug":"for-a-new-generation-of-woodworkers-form-follows-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/2021\/10\/04\/for-a-new-generation-of-woodworkers-form-follows-function\/","title":{"rendered":"For a New Generation of Woodworkers, Form Follows Function"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author: <\/strong>Noor Brara<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Date: <\/strong>Sept. 21, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher: <\/strong>NYTimes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response to the colorful, zanier side of modern furniture, some American craftspeople are returning to elemental, straightforward, and handmade pieces<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIF A CHAIR or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous,\u201d wrote the American artist and furniture maker Donald Judd<\/a> in his 1993 essay \u201cIt\u2019s Hard to Find a Good Lamp<\/a>.\u201d In the piece, he derides most commercially available furniture \u2014 too overstuffed, too bourgeois, too obsessed with the past \u2014 and explains why, in the early \u201970s, he felt compelled to design his own objects, first to fill his homes in Marfa, Texas, and Manhattan, and later to sell. According to Judd, while art is conceived to exist purely on its own terms, a chair is to be sat upon; its form should \u201cnever violate\u201d that function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of Judd\u2019s resulting pieces \u2014 clean, right-angled plywood beds, blocky chairs, rudimentary worktables and desks \u2014 were influenced by the handmade hardwood furniture of the Shakers<\/a>, a sect of celibate Christians who came to America from England in the 1770s and made pieces for themselves and others that reflected their ascetic principles. In communities in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, they constructed objects from domestic, inexpensive pine that were at once light and sturdy, dependable but yielding, often featuring ladder slats, tapered legs and wooden pulls.Read More From T\u2019s Design & Luxury Issue<\/a>An Architect Who\u2019s Known for Aesthetic Purity and Counts Kanye West as a ClientSept. 20, 2021<\/a>Fall Fashion With a Sense of AdventureSept. 21, 2021<\/a>Architecture and Design That Makes the Case for DiscomfortSept. 20, 2021<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judd\u2019s homages to these works, which he considered the last of American styles to recognize the quiet dignity of a chair, inspired designers for decades. Now, though, there\u2019s a new crop of small domestic studios that are reconsidering what elemental wood furniture looks like. If the early part of the century was defined by the splashier, Instagram-baiting revivalist movements of the recent past \u2014 whether Kartell-inflected plastic, 1990s postmodernism or color-drunk Memphis tributes \u2014 these young creatives feel, as Judd did, that straightforward functionality should supplant the desire to conflate furniture with art. With stripped-down, uncomplicated objects assembled from locally sourced woods, they are creating pieces that speak less to a particular aesthetic, time or place than to the concept of honest craftsmanship espoused by their forebears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, Marvell Lahens<\/a>, the 30-year-old founder of the Oakland, Calif.-based Maison Og\u00e9<\/a>, which began in 2018 as a fashion line. Back then, he had one goal: to reinterpret the quintessential T-shirt by sliding its pocket to the center. \u201cI\u2019m no good at inventing,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I am good at distilling and making one subtle move that will hopefully change everything.\u201d In the last year, Lahens shifted to furniture, driven by a desire to work with his hands: Using oak and Baltic birch plywood, he produced objects that resembled some of Judd\u2019s earliest experiments \u2014 shelving and seating cut from seemingly raw planks of blond wood \u2014 before graduating to tubular stools and side tables. The only embellishment is the occasional circular cutout on the arm of a chair or the side of a shelf \u2014 a way to make the work \u201cdazzle,\u201d Lahens says, without disrupting functionality.Sign Up for the T List Newsletter  <\/strong>A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now. Get it sent to your inbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For these makers, the decision to assemble objects by hand was as much about achieving autonomy as it was about reducing noise and clutter in their own lives. \u201cThis pared-back aesthetic allows for the individual [designer] to insert themselves maybe more than with something that\u2019s ornate or that\u2019s screaming a message,\u201d says Michaele Simmering, 43, of the Los Angeles-based Kalon<\/a>, which she co-founded with her German husband, Johannes Pauwen, 44, in 2007. The couple had moved from Berlin to America two years earlier, and they established their practice after noticing that solid, clean wooden furniture was harder to find in the States than in Europe. Working with a small team of New England craftspeople to source timber from sustainably managed forests, they released a collection of hand-rubbed hardwood dining tables, cribs and standing bookshelves, alongside cushioned items like the Rugosa Daybed, a rudimentary platform assembled from three planks of sugar pine and named after a bohemian Rhode Island seaside summer house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The desire to own furniture that\u2019s made for real life, that\u2019s meant to anchor us in unmooring times, is meaningful, these designers feel. It\u2019s what drove Kili Martinez and Lizzy Hoss of the Brooklyn-based LilBarnabis<\/a> to make utilitarian rectangular desks and shelves from plywood in 2020, after losing their jobs. (Martinez, 29, was a woodworker for a fabrication company; Hoss, 31, a producer for a fashion brand.) Their pieces are inspired by Judd, the Japanese American architect and craftsman George Nakashima<\/a> and Martinez\u2019s own mentor and former boss, Francis Lazarski, a cabinetmaker based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard<\/a>. \u201cFurniture should be simple,\u201d Martinez says. \u201cWhy complicate things more than they already are?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editors\u2019 Picks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In a Memoir, the Impeachment Witness Fiona Hill Recounts Her Journey From \u2018Blighted World\u2019 to White House<\/a>What We Learned From Week 4 of the N.F.L. Season<\/a>\u2018It\u2019s Like Kismet\u2019: How a Long-Empty Building Found the Perfect Tenant<\/a>Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That focus on livability also runs through Aaron Aujla and Ben Bloomstein\u2019s Manhattan-based Green River Project<\/a>, which has risen in tandem with Aujla\u2019s wife, Emily Bode\u2019s<\/a>, namesake clothing-and-design shop on the Lower East Side, where she displays her pieces on low stools and gallery-length benches. Aujla, 35, and Bloomstein, 33, met in 2010 while working as artists\u2019 studio assistants; in 2017, they began to produce their wooden furniture at the latter\u2019s family farm in Hillsdale, N.Y. \u201cAs two people with art backgrounds, we were taught since our school days to defend our theses,\u201d Aujla says. \u201cIt seems the design world is often missing that, which made us feel like we didn\u2019t fit in. Like, who is actually living in these spaces people pay attention to? That\u2019s the question we found ourselves asking.\u201d In recent months, the duo has decided to foreground practicality. \u201cI\u2019ve realized that working with humble materials like wood to create furniture is on the same level as these really staged, sterile-looking environments,\u201d Bloomstein adds. \u201cIt\u2019s just that you can picture yourself with it a little more easily.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s the point \u2014 that these pieces will be used and battered and repaired and perhaps passed down over generations. \u201cWe want to make work that feels good for you,\u201d says Emily Ewbank, 35, who in 2020, with her 41-year-old husband, Martin Sztyk, launched the Los Angeles-based\u00a0Baenk<\/a>, a tightly focused line of nine multipurpose plywood objects, from open bookcases to benches with button-like joinery. \u201cAnd this just does.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Comments: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is good to get other perspectives of what I am going to be doing to see what other people believe. I do enjoy simplicity but I think that a lot of people will enjoy being able to design their own furniture, at a fraction of the cost of other custom furniture pieces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree to an extent that furniture should be simple, but I also think that they just aren’t that good at making furniture so they say extremely simple pieces are the best (when in reality they just can’t make it more complex). But that is of course only a theory. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author: Noor Brara Date: Sept. 21, 2021 Publisher: NYTimes In response to the colorful, zanier side of modern furniture, some American craftspeople are returning to elemental, straightforward, and handmade pieces \u201cIF A CHAIR or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous,\u201d wrote the American artist and furniture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":8909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8912,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8908\/revisions\/8912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}