{ Category Archives: all }
I’ve always liked to use chalk when roughing things out on wood. Lately I’ve taken to scouring the beaches during negative low tides in search of seashells for making my marks. The Pacific Razor Clam is ideal, softer than the East Coast equivalent, but hard enough to make a clean scratch, and loaded with calcium carbonate to leave a crisp white line.
I can relate to the work style of a 1930’s American cabinet shop (public domain)
After over a year of design development with the architect and client, selecting logs of deodar cedar and having them custom milled and cured to outfit the interior of a new guest house down the coast, I’m regaining perspective on my original thinking behind how I approached the project: Shuffling the Tree.
As my cabinets, doors and built-in furnishings take shape, each part of the tree finds its corresponding use in built form, the planks having been painstakingly graded for grain character, color and structural integrity. The process of hand sorting thousands of board feet of air-dried, rough sawn lumber has been slower than I had anticipated, but well worth the effort, and I’m feeling less overwhelmed as I convert my neatly stickered piles into glowing wooden furnishings. I’m taking extra pains not to use any laminated sheet materials, constructing all casework in solid stock.
I’ve found that designing and building this way automatically bestows a building with a feeling of belonging-ness, as though the house stands in honor of the tree it displaced. When the material is locally sourced from the waste stream, diverted from horticultural salvage that might otherwise be burned as firewood, the building’s interior has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere. I call my approach ‘bioregional vernacular’, and I’m glad for the opportunity to test its scalability.
cabinets of deodar cedar w/face frames, stacked up while I prepare doors and drawers
To follow my progress on designing and building the guest house interior, please click here and scroll down.
Greenwood: Selective Harvesting Preserves Forests
Though I’ve built just one boat to date, I’ve been an avid reader of WoodenBoat magazine for over 25 years. The publication is a major torch-bearer for the practice of traditional boat-building, and a treasure trove of primary source knowledge for all things wood. My favorite feature is invariably the Wood Technology column by Richard Jagels, forest biologist and professor at University of Maine. The persistence of woodcraft requires constant adaptation to changing conditions, and Richard’s column always provides valuable, in-depth perspective on forest ecology as it relates to sourcing and processing wood products.
I was thrilled to learn that Jagels has taken his work out of the halls of academia as a founding director of Greenwood Global, a non-profit dedicated to protecting both forests and traditional artisanry internationally.
surfer/shaper Andy Lambrecht takes a break in Sayulita
I met surfboard maker Andy Lambrecht on our last day in Sayulita, Mexico. I noticed his handmade wooden board by the beached fishing boats as we were packing up and getting ready to catch a bus back to Puerto Vallarta. Based in British Columbia, Andy makes a variety of hollow surfboards using reclaimed woods from local sources, which he typically re-saws and book-matches in elegant patterns- imperfections like nail holes are artfully incorporated into each board’s unique composition.
Andy is on paternity leave and will be in Sayulita with his wife and their two young daughters for three months, surfing and hanging out (talk about a health care program!). He brought along his shaping tools and has already landed a commission- a surfboard in exchange for work on his ailing car after the arduous journey southward. I look forward to keeping in touch with Andy Lambrecht, and have invited him and his family for a visit on their way back up the coast.
Sayulita, Nayarit, Mexico
Spending time in Sayulita always restores my faith in humanity. For whatever combination of reasons- its remoteness through jungle along the Pacific Coast, cut-off from major roads until relatively recently; its consistently overhead, left/right break; its laid back balance of bohemian surf culture and traditional fishing village- everyone is unabashedly happy in Sayulita. Like guests at a well-hosted party, everyone has a unique role to play, the machinery oiled by mutual trust and respect. When the ‘little things’ that comprise daily life take precedence over the ‘big things’ outside our control, everyone takes charge. When the inverse is the case, the opposite is true.
‘Le Corbusier meets Gilligan’s Island’ characterizes the playful architecture of Sayulita
action at Mavericks portends the arrival of spring to the N. Pacific (public domain)
In West Sonoma County, early signs of spring are typically in sync with the arrival of a huge south swell, epitomized by the epic surf at Mavericks, about 100 miles down the coast. With more daylight and warming temperatures over the past few weeks, our hens have begun laying eggs, the acacia trees are in flower, the willow’s catkin is giving way to leaf, and the wild plum trees are beginning to blossom along exposed slopes. Yellow mustard flowers fill grazing meadows, vineyards and apple orchards, the clover beginning to recede. As we pack for the coming week of vacation on the beach north of Puerto Vallarta, I anticipate returning to a flood of fruit trees in full flower.
the acacia trees are in bloom along the Sonoma Coast
the willows are looking lively along the streams
To read more of my postings on cyclical, seasonal events, please click here and scroll down.
a simple bench made of packing crates reinforces the charming illusion of Chinatown
Part of the allure of San Francisco’s Chinatown is that it was conceived as, and remains a study in authentic inauthenticity. Despite the fact that China has emerged as a global economic power, people from all over the world are drawn to the colorful neighborhood shops, crammed with kitschy souvenirs of a re-imagined, Asian exotica.
In a way, the illusion is the perfect front, reinforcing the Western perception that China is a nonthreatening, pre-industrial giant resigned to making cheap knock-offs for tourists on a budget. A contemporary ‘Chinatown’ in any American city might resemble something more like a high end, design-driven shopping center, with modernist buildings, innovative restaurants and luxury emporiums.
Given that the tables have been turned in regard to our relationship to China, it seems more appropriate to envision an ‘Americatown’ in any of China’s thriving cities, perhaps in the form of a WW2 era New York- a Woolworth’s with a lunch counter, a jazz club, barbershop and movie theater, showing vintage movies and news reels.