Ene and me reflected in Anish Kapoor’s ‘Bean’ sculpture, Chicago, earlier this summer

Before I launch full bore into documenting A Year in Surf I wanted to update current wowhaus projects. I will maintain a running log of projects as they accumulate, but will soon shift the focus of deepcraft to my active pursuit of surfing. I think you’ll agree that surf culture is in many ways a unifying theme to the thrust of past and present wowhaus projects, which increasingly focus on watershed ecology, structural invention and making beautiful things and places.

Our fish sculptures (’Abundance‘) are coming to life as they are skinned with tile

Our wax ‘Stepping Stones’ are ready to be cast in bronze for our Oakland Watershed Marker Project

We’ve selected sites to install our ‘Stepping Stones’ relief sculptures, drawing attention to Oakland’s many hidden creeks comprising a complex, urban watershed

Conference Table for the managing offices of  ‘Marin County Mart’ (photo taken when the conference room was under construction)

I recently designed this conference table for the offices of Jim Rosenfield, owner of Marin Country Mart. The design developed collaboratively from concept sketches by Jim, with proportional and color consultation from Greg Turpan, who has been instrumental in defining the look and feel of the innovative shopping center. The table is 10 feet long and 34″ wide with 4 x 4 legs in solid Claro walnut. The top is lightweight for its size, being a hollow ‘torsion box’ with a honeycomb core of 1/4″ plywood making an internal grid of 3″ squares. To make a seamless surface on all six sides, the top is skinned with full length panels of MDF, with ‘folded miter’ corners. The top is finished on all sides with six layers of catalyzed urethane, hand-polished to a high gloss. I borrowed from hollow surfboard construction when conceiving the table. I’ve enjoyed working with Jim and Greg on the project and am honored to contribute to Marin Country Mart, which is fast becoming a major Bay Area icon.

Meanwhile, I’m nearing completion of a residential interior I’ve designed and built in Marin County, and permits are in place and construction is underway on an ‘Observation Tower’ I recently designed for a rural property in Sonoma County. Photos to follow soon!

Tagged: deep craft, furniture design, greg turpan, innovation, marin country mart, Oakland, public art, scott Constable, wowhaus

We tested my Greens Chair at Greens Restaurant over a four course dinner

On the eve of our first full week home after six weeks of travel, Ene, Aili and I celebrated with a prix fixe, four course dinner at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. Mike Hale, Greens’ manager, generously comped the meal as a gesture of thanks for the chairs I recently designed that now populate the restaurant’s expansive interior.

My lovely ladies enjoying a delicious dinner, as the sun set over the Golden Gate

By all accounts, the chairs are a tremendous success, adding a touch of structure and formality to the dining experience without detracting from its casual simplicity or bohemian legacy. More importantly, we got to test the chairs over an elegant, beautifully prepared and presented vegetarian feast, and they proved to be perfectly comfortable all the way through coffee and dessert. The Greens Chair is the first furniture commission at this scale where I have not actually made the furnishings myself, hadn’t touched and shaped each piece of wood with my own hands, yet I was pleased to feel the same pride of authorship as if I had.

Most of the Greens Chairs are made of maple, with just 16 in walnut

As we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on our way back up the coast in the lingering twilight, while Ene snoozed and Aili surfed her iPod, I began to reflect upon the relationship between craft and design, content with the fruits of my labor. I’m called more and more frequently to shift roles between maker and designer, and I find it helps to make a smooth transition by keeping a foot in either world.

the view from our table at Greens, looking West towards the Golden Gate

‘Craft’ is too broad a term for consensus on its meaning, which can range from implying a level of skill in handiwork, to standing in for pre-industrial technologies, to being a kind of hobby or therapy. For the sake of clarity, I think of ‘craft’ more as an artisanal production model, connoting things made using local resources- material, knowledge, and energy. In such a craft-based production model, ‘design’ is often an afterthought. The final thing more or less emerges from the constraints of tradition and the limitations of resources. Most products of this system live in the past- the Windsor Chair, basket-making, vernacular architecture in general- but they still influence the visual culture of design. From this perspective, ‘craft’ and ‘design’ are mutually exclusive.

While craft is a bottom-up strategy, design is a top-down one. Design most often begins with a visual representation of a thing to be made, but exactly how it is made is incidental to its final manifestation. When called to design something made at an industrial scale, I begin the process by thinking as a traditional artisan might, given the resources of labor and technology in today’s world. I don’t have any preconception of how anything will look, but trust in an ethos of Exuberant Frugality. I try to optimize material and structure, nest functions and eliminate waste, knowing that this will make room for quality to emerge at all stages of a design’s development, and that the ethos will resonate with anyone who works with their hands.

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, greens restaurant, innovation, scott Constable, slow food, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, windsor chair, woodworking

The following text accompanies an installation I made as part of the NOMO Exhibition we’ve designed and curated as the culmination of our residency at Kohler Arts. Over the past few weeks I’ve made fictional, yet plausible sculptural elements that support the idea that surfing has origins on the Great Lakes. I will provide more detail soon about the NOMO Exhibition, but here’s a preview of my “Legend of Lumberjack Surfing” installation:

The Legend of Lumberjack Surfing

“There is a little known legend that surfing has early 19^th century origins on the Western shores of Lake Michigan, separate from its more ancient roots on the islands of the South Pacific.

When timber rafts were floated down Wisconsin’s rivers to be shipped to far off urban centers, large slabs of wood occasionally broke loose along the lake and washed ashore. Enterprising lumberjacks and boat-builders often rescued the timbers by drifting them offshore, standing atop them and paddling them to beachfront workshops, occasionally attaching sails to ease the journey. When the surf was heavy, the maritime lumberjacks beached the timbers by riding waves to shore, steering with a long wooden paddle. Over time, the activity of riding waves became an end in itself, and the ‘lumberjack surfers’ learned to shape the rough sawn planks for better performance in the waves.

By the early 20^th century, the ‘lumberjack surfers’ adapted wooden boards to ride on land by attaching crude wheels to their undersides, thus inventing an early form of the skateboard. Many of these ‘trapper’s skateboards’ were made from stretchers originally used to tan wolf hides. By the middle of the 20^th century, experimental skateboards were commonly made from discarded, wooden alpine and water skis, which were rapidly being replaced by fiberglass.”

Another part of the NOMO Exhibition at Kohler Arts features longboard skate graphics I designed collaboratively, like the Northern Pike Longboard (above) drawn by Mary Whitehall and Zak Worth. The burnt/etched deck is part of a series depicting fish native to Lake Michigan

Tagged: appropriate technology, bike culture, contemporary art, craft philosophy, deep craft, DIY, furniture design, green design, innovation, kohler arts, longboard, public art, scott Constable, skateboard, slow design, surfing, sustainability, tall tale, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

I made my ‘indoor sawhorses’ to double as a table base

In all my years working with wood I’ve never felt the need to own or build a proper workbench. For a long time, I simply lacked the dedicated space and opted instead for working mostly outside, preferring to stage my work on sawhorses and collapsible building jigs tailored to a particular use. The scraps from one project would have an afterlife as the rudimentary furnishings to make the next. During the rainy season, projects would occasionally migrate indoors, so I made sawhorses as though they were furniture (pictured above). The prolonged lack of a dedicated bench opened up my thinking to the kinds of projects I would consider taking on, and I learned how limitations can be liberating.

To me, there’s also something inherently a little sad about a workbench. Like a well-intended New Year’s resolution, a workbench tends to be over-built and under-used, its function shifting too easily from utility to burden. Sawhorses, on the other hand, take up very little space, and both their construction and use are perpetually open to interpretation. Now that I have more space than I ever imagined, I still opt for sawhorses over workbench, a strategy more in keeping with the ever-fluctuating scope and scale of my projects.

Here are some ideal characteristics of good sawhorses:

• Lightweight
• Strong enough to stand on
• Stacking
• Flexible enough to conform to uneven surfaces
• Able to live outdoors for extended periods
• Constructed of recycled or scrap lumber

However you plan to use it, the most important feature of a good sawhorse is that it be owner-built; designing and making a sawhorse is the perfect, first furniture project.

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

Greens Restaurant manager Mike Hale helps unload and install 140 Greens Chairs

Early this week I delivered 140 newly minted, Greens Chairs I designed specifically for San Francisco’s Greens Restaurant in honor of its 30^th anniversary and subsequent interior renovation. Fourteen of the chairs are made of walnut and will surround a functional sculpture by J.B. Blunk (1926-2002), dating to the restaurant’s origins. The commission came to me through my friend Mariah Nielson, J.B.’s daughter, who runs the J.B. Blunk Residency and was hired to consult about how best to honor the carved, massive redwood sculpture, in keeping with its contemporary surroundings. The other chairs are made of maple to compliment handmade tables and furnishings crafted by Paul Discoe and other artisans associated with the San Francisco Zen Center in the late 1970’s.

My design for the Greens Chair evolved from my Elder Chair, a design I originally prototyped for the School Lunch Initiative associated with Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley. The Greens Chair was inspired as much by the Buddhist ethos of its namesake restaurant as by the restaurant’s dramatic setting on the Bay, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

As Greens Restaurant manager Mike Hale helped unpack the chairs, they happily basked in the California sun and were kissed by a stiff sea breeze coming off the Bay, before finding their way home inside the iconic restaurant at Fort Mason. I’m very proud of my chair’s uniquely Bay Area pedigree and hope to see it become a contemporary classic.

To read more about the development of the Greens Chair, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: alice waters, deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, golden gate bridge, greens restaurant, jb blunk, mariah nielson, paul discoe, san francisco zen center, scott Constable, slow design, slow food, windsor chair, woodworking

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

My humble ESY stool can hold its own in a room full of Danish Chairs

As I begin to make small production runs of my ESY stool (pictured above) to fill an increase in demand, I’ve been enjoying sending them out into the world and seeing where they land. Last week I delivered a sample to the office suite of a commercial real estate developer, and left it in a conference room under construction, nestled amongst a cluster of elegant Danish chairs. The stool worked perfectly with the setting, which got me thinking about what makes for a kind of universal style, or a style of no style. In my experience, the style of no style is a consequence of Radical Pragmatism.

I originally developed the stool as a minimalist seating solution for the Middle School Dining Commons associated with Alice Waters’ acclaimed Edible Schoolyard project. The stools stack up to 7 high, consist of just three repeated parts, and use a bare minimum of native, California hardwoods, traditionally joined into a lightweight but durable seat. The ESY stool doubles nicely as an occasional table. Most important, I prototyped and manufactured the original batch of 120 stools myself, and designed it around my minimal production capabilities, knowing I would need to keep costs down to compete with comparable products already in production. The stool is now made in small batches by a local shop, each batch sequenced with wood from the same sustainably milled logs. Sales have increased as the stool becomes available, and I look forward to scaling production in respect of the stool’s original ethos, eventually making it available on the Goods pages of this site.

Tagged: aesthetics, alice waters, chair design, craft, deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, innovation, sustainability, woodworking