sometimes I make up songs during a long walk

There is no better design tool than a good long walk. It may not always lead to creative breakthroughs, but does reliably clear the noggin and put things in perspective. Before I begin to think about a particular project during a walk, I usually find myself simply getting into the cadence and breathing of walking, sometimes making up phrases and melodies to help me focus. Whether or not I make progress with the project at hand, I always return to the studio feeling relaxed and optimistic, eager to field the inevitable challenges of the day.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, scott Constable, woodworking

Here the soils of daily washing
stay on the land, conveyed by gravity
through pipes to the leach fields
to join the earth of the tree duff,
filtering fresh rainfall to
replenish the dwelling well.

Meanwhile the ferrous field well
spews rustily over the garden,
adding a mineral edge to
the lusty bite of a tomato or
the lean green snap of a pole bean,
washed clean by the other water.

Tagged: appropriate technology, deep craft, poetry, scott Constable, slow design

One of three ’seed heads’ of stainless steel and crystal, fabricated by Jeff McCann

After a year of planning with the City of San Jose’s Public Art Program, we’re excited to be finally installing our Wishing Wands sculptures at Berryessa Creek Park. The latest Wowhaus project consists of three 12′ high sculptures depicting ‘dandelions’ in their parachute ball stage, rendered in stainless steel and Austrian crystal. The concept was inspired by the universal practice of children blowing on the plant’s downy-dry seed head and making a wish, which is what we found the neighborhood children to be doing during our exploratory site visit to the park last year. While the sculptures were under fabrication, Ene conducted a wishing workshop with the children who frequent the park, where they made wishes on the 120 crystals to be mounted on the three seed heads. Like magic wands, the sculptures will cast cascades of tiny rainbows when the sun refracts through the prismatic crystals.

a neighborhood boy makes a wish on one of the 120 crystals; early concept rendering

The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is one of the world’s most prolific weeds, whose English name is a corruption of the French dent de lion (lion’s tooth). In many languages, the flower’s name reflects the universal appeal of blowing on the seed head during its parachute ball phase; the flower is variously called pusteblume (German for “blowing flower”), soffione (Italian for “blowing”; in some northern Italian dialects), dmuchawiec (Polish, derived from the verb “blow”), одуванчик (Russian, derived from the verb “blow”).

The First Dandelion, by Walt Whitman

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass–innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

Tagged: contemporary art, deep craft, flowers, invention, public art, scott Constable, slow design, wowhaus

In the powdered donut drawer,
a bank’s blue ballpoint pens.

Beneath the white pine floor
damp sand beds cedar cellar beams.

Above the front screen door,
the transom’s wavy pane’s trimmed,
pinned with enough loving imperfection

to shed a season’s rains in a blow,
sweetening the chamfered glow.

Tagged: deep craft, poem, scent memory, scott Constable

Funny how nostalgia works.

In the wowhaus (my tiny urban garden studio and namesake for www.thewowhaus.com) I missed the wild raging sea. Now that we live in a forest by the coast, I miss being in my cozy wowhaus, missing something like what I now actually have.



Tagged: poem, wowhaus