the Greens management team loved my prototype Greens Chair

Like the Golden Gate Bridge that looms across the Bay from San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason Center, Greens Restaurant is a Bay Area icon. With close ties to the San Francisco Zen Center, the restaurant has embodied an ethos of attentive living and eating for over thirty years, heralding a new age of vegetarian cuisine. I recently presented my prototype Greens Chair, which I was commissioned to design by the restaurant’s management team, and was truly honored to have it pass their rigorous requirements of functionality and aesthetics. The Greens management team includes acclaimed chef Annie Somerville and at least one ordained zen Buddhist priest, and everyone took turns testing the chair with earnest focus. The team agreed that the chair encourages mindfulness for both diners and staff, which is the highest compliment to me.

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, deep craft, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, scott Constable, slow design, windsor chair, woodworking, zen center

Translated from the Latin, Labor Me Vocat is roughly, ‘duty calls’, an apt motto describing my current state of affairs. As is occasionally inevitable in a life of craftwork, my head and hands are now fully focused on realizing a string of challenging projects, and my posts on this site will be less frequent.

I began this experimental weblog two years ago as a way to organize my thinking about craft during the course of daily life and work, as a contemporary take on the ‘jointer’s journals’ of 18th century carpenters. To that end, I’ve come full circle, and am confident the site now functions pretty well as an elaborate articulation of my philosophy of craft, hopefully useful as an idiosyncratic ‘pattern book’ of an approach to sustainable design applicable across disciplines and diverse media. I’ve tried to consistently distill my thoughts in an ongoing manifesto, which codifies an ethos of making and invites elaboration by others.

In closing out this phase of Deep Craft, and in preparing to lay the groundwork for a new body of work informed by my research, I hope to draw some conclusions. I’ve learned to see craft as a bridge between art and design, a way of making aesthetic inquiry empirical. Ultimately, the practice of craft is a strategy or method for matching one’s inner state to outside conditions, which to me defines an ideal state of comfort.

I thank all of my devoted readers across the globe for their support, and hope to hear from folks about their favorite posts as I consider developing Deep Craft as a book proposal. In the interim, please feel free to ‘friend’ me on Facebook. – Sincerely, Scott Constable

Tagged: aesthetics, contemporary art, craft philosophy, deep craft, green design, scott Constable, sustainability

1/4 scale model of my new dining chair concept for Greens Restaurant

I generally try to avoid working under pressure, but find I often do my best work with my back up against the wall. When our Wowhaus Interview was published in San Francisco magazine last month, I was just beginning to clear the decks and shift my focus to a demanding interior design project. To my surprise and delight, the article inspired a bevy of inquiries about my furniture design, leading to several new commissions, including a new dining chair for the famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco.

Over the holidays, I’ve designed a simplified, affordable adaptation of my Elder Chair, located a manufacturer and built a 1/4 scale model (pictured above), which I will present to the Greens management team later this week. The new chair combines the open-quadrant-backrest styling of my Elder Chair, which I originally developed for Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Dining Commons, with the structural program of the Pilot Chair I recently designed and made for Becoming Independent. To mimic the wall of rectangular window panes looking towards the Golden Gate from inside of Greens, I elongated the open quadrants and narrowed the backrest, emphasizing the chair’s verticality. I also added an upholstered seat as a concession to comfort, considering the typically fit, lean patron of Greens.

Tagged: deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, innovation, scott Constable, slow design, woodworking

Most people know Ene, my wife and wowhaus partner, as one of the sunniest people they’ve met, and rightfully so. Our wowhaus compound has been blessed by her love of planting, harvesting and saving seeds, as she eagerly scouts out patches of sun throughout the year, populating them with seasonal flowers and vegetable gardens, battling hungry deer and gopher with joyous aplumb.

With the soil softened and moist from early rains and short days, Ene is truly in her element as she purposefully marches about the property, picking the last of the apples, dragging hoses and planting fruit trees, mulched with woodshop shavings. Her winter garden is predictably unruly, its inner logic a kind of living, visual manifestation of Ene’s happy hands and exuberant spirit. We eat well from Ene’s Winter Garden, where collard greens, dyno kale and lettuces thrive, and I love nothing more than to discover what’s ready to cook, driven by hunger to forage at dusk for the family dinner.

Ene’s Autumn Greens

Saute bacon in a cast iron skillet. Remove bacon to drain on a cloth or paper towel. Drain the bacon fat from the pan, leaving some. Add olive oil and saute sliced onions until slightly softened. Add chopped kale, collards or other green, tossing with the onions over medium high heat. When the greens are tender, de-glaze the pan with apple cider vinegar and toss in chopped apples and the bacon, crumbled into pieces. Reduce heat and allow to simmer until flavors blend, adding water if the mixture is dry. Season with salt and pepper and serve over pasta or as a side dish with roasted chicken or fish.

Tagged: aesthetics, california flora, deep craft, gardening, slow food, sonoma coast, wowhaus

three of eight Space Chairs for Becoming Independent, ready for finishing

I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with artists with developmental disabilities in the design of my Space Chairs for the new playroom at Becoming Independent (BI) in Santa Rosa. The eight chairs are made from locally-milled Monterey Cypress, and their backs frame panels lovingly painted by eight individual artists who regularly participate in BI’s innovative Artworks Program. The chairs, half of which have arms, will be used daily by children of all ages who have varying degrees of developmental disabilities. I’m very pleased with the outcome, whose design program has been a challenge, requiring safety, durability, low cost and ease of configuration. I’m confident the project will prove to be a successful prototype for continued collaboration, and I look forward to exploring the potential for more expressive forms featuring panels painted by the Artists of Becoming Independent.

To follow the thread on my collaboration with Becoming Independent, please click here.

Tagged: appropriate technology, becoming independent, chair design, contemporary art, deep craft, furniture design, innovation, scott Constable, slow design, woodworking

modified Windsor chair concept with steam-bent, bundled parts

Most of my furniture design over the past ten years or so has developed either from a particular need or from the properties of a particular material, usually wood. Lately I’ve been wanting to broaden my target by channeling my resources into the creation of a signature chair, a Deepcraft icon that adds to the canon of classic chair design. One of the goals of this experimental site is to unpack exactly what that means and hopefully discover how to translate a design philosophy into a truly sustainable production model in the process.

If and when I succeed, the thinking behind the chair will fold into the chair’s broad appeal as one of life’s Simple Good Things and I will assuage any guilt about burdening consumer culture with yet more stuff. More ambitiously, the chair will stand in for a philosophy of design with the potential to more broadly influence the built environment and contribute to the (critique of) public taste. Ultimately, my interest is in how the natural and the built environments can work in congruency to suggest mutually beneficial loops. What follows are some of the discursive questions I have that guide my thinking in the process: Continue Reading »

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, craft manifesto, deep craft, green design, mildred's lane, scott Constable, sustainability, windsor

The road from Valley Ford to Two Rock is flanked by furrowed fields of freshly mowed hay, ready for baling. Pretty soon the barns will be stocked to the rafters with sweet hay, elucidating their proportional relationship to the fields they occupy. Craftwork begins with the localization of supply and demand; contentment begins with their balance.

Tagged: aesthetics, craft, hay, sonoma coast