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

Bodger’s camp in the Chiltern beech woods, late 19th century (from The English Regional Chair, Bernard D. Cotton, Antique Collector’s Club, 1990)

The strategy behind my residency at Mildred’s Lane will be multi-tiered, ranging from the development of a working, craft  production facility on site to the promotion and marketing of Goods to be produced, via the World Wide Web. I’m calling the craft production facility Field Lab, and it will build on the tradition of Windsor Chair making that originated along the Thames River during the 18th century, upstream and to the West of London.

Windsor chair making  in the The Chilterns and Thames Valley (from The English Regional Chair, Bernard D. Cotton, Antique Collector’s Club, 1990)

The actual product will be determined through a survey of available skills and resources reflecting the aspirations of Mildred’s Lane as well as its bioregional provenance. Whatever the specific outcome, my farther-reaching goals will be to introduce some icon of elegant utility that upholds the Deepcraft ethos I’ve articulated on these pages, where equal pleasure is derived from the making, distribution, use and improvement of the Goods made. Beyond my residency, the Field Lab will live on  as a contemporary interpretation of the traditional ‘bodger’s shack’ (pictured at top), taking advantage of modern conveniences befitting the Deepcraft paradigm. My hope is that the Field Lab will elicit the same feeling conveyed in a 1955 letter by Mr George Dean, one of the last traditional chair makers of the Chiltern Woodland:

“It was a strangely enjoyable life, carefree and a bit lonesome if your mate was away. In the spring it was lovely as the trees took on their fresh green leaf, and in the winter, the sighing of the wind and the sight of the birds gathering in the branches when the smoke ascended at meal times. Occasionally the robins would build by the lathe side in the thatch, and hatch the eggs and rear the young. Now and then a wren would make a cosy nest and flit about. Once a flock of pigeons descended on the trees around our shops just after dark. The noise of their flapping wings was alarming as they settled in the tree tops, too exhausted to heed us very much as we worked by candlelight in our primitive way.”

-from The English Regional Chair, Bernard D. Cotton, Antique Collector’s Club, 1990

Click here to follow the thread of posts relating to Mildred’s Lane.

Tagged: bodgering, chair-making, contemporary art, deep craft, mildred's lane, scott Constable, thames valley, the chilterns, traditional craft, windsor chair

map of the bioregions relating to the Delaware River and its tributaries, including portions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Virginia and Maryland (from The Encyclopedia of Earth)

As a woodworker, I make a habit of studying the bioregion for site specific projects to get a sense of scale and context, with an eye towards material provenance, land use and ecology. In preparing for my residency at Mildred’s Lane, I was pleased to find a detailed atlas of the bioregions affecting the Delaware River and its extensive tributaries at the website of The Encyclopedia of Earth. Mildred’s Lane is within the Lower Catskills bioregion, the dark green area at the Northeastern corner of Pennsylvania where it borders New York (top right of the above image), described by The Encyclopedia of Earth website as follows:

62e. Low Catskills
The Low Catskills (62e) is a forested and highly dissected ecoregion less than 5 miles (8 km) wide in northeastern Pennsylvania. Here, the Delaware River has deeply entrenched into the glaciated Appalachian Plateau, creating cliffs and steep-walled valleys. Many high-gradient tributaries occur and stream organisms associated with riffles are common. Topography is rugged for this part of the commonwealth and local relief ranges from about 450 to 800 feet (137-244 m). Crestal elevations are from approximately 1,300 to 1,800 feet (396-549 m) and are high enough to insure a short growing season of about 130 days, varying according to local topography and slope aspect.

The soils of Ecoregion 62e are mostly Inceptisols. Most formed on Olean Till and some developed on Quaternary alluvium. They overlie nearly horizontal, Devonian age sandstone, siltstone, and shale of the Catskill Formation. The soils are characterized by stoniness, shallowness, low fertility, and acidity, which, together with the rugged terrain and brief growing season, make the area best suited to woodland (Higbee, 1967). The natural vegetation was mostly Northern Hardwoods (dominants: sugar maple, yellow birch, beech, and hemlock) (Cuff and others, 1989, p. 52). Some wetland vegetation occurs on poorly drained sites, and northern rock plants grow on the Delaware River cliffs in northeastern Wayne County (Erdman and Wiegman, 1974, p. 50).

The boundary between Ecoregion 62e and the less dissected Northeastern Uplands (60b) occurs at the forest density and topography break shown on the Scranton Ecoregion 62e extends across the Delaware River into New York, where it becomes much more extensive. 1:250,000-scale topographic map; Ecoregion 62e is much more rugged and wooded than Ecoregion 60b

Tagged: bioregion/vernacular, craft, deep craft, delaware river, ecoregion, geography, green design, mildred's lane, scott Constable, sustainable products, woodworking

The Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, map 6/15, Army Corps of Engineers, 1944, Harold Fisk, chief cartographer

Documenting the seasonal cycles over the past few months (see my Week in Bloom postings) has me thinking a lot about bioregions and watersheds as the most appropriate scale for human interaction with the natural world and with each other. I think of vernacular forms in the built environment- domestic architecture, traditional craft- as the most consistent, universal kind of natural/cultural expression of any bioregion. In many ways, my activities designing and making things, and the general thrust of this site, are attempts to model a contemporary, bioregional credo. My ideas for projects typically stem directly from the inherent natural/cultural attributes of a place, beginning with straight-up observation.

I continue to look at maps and data related to the upper Delaware River and Lower Catskills  bioregion as I prepare to test my Deepcraft approach as a resident artist at Mildred’s Lane next month. In the course of my research, a friend sent a link to a website dedicated to experimental geography, called Radical Cartography, that includes a series of beautiful watershed maps of the entire Mississippi River  (see above) made by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1940’s (exactly when Harlan and Anna Hubbard were drifting down its length in their home-made Shanty Boat). Called Mississippi Meanders, the series of 15 maps details drainage patterns of the river’s basin from Southern Illinois to Southern Louisiana, where it drains into the Gulf of Mexico. I hope to make a very small scale map of the watershed comprising Mildred’s Lane and its surroundings, with layers reflecting plant life and material provenance.

Tagged: bioregionalism, deep craft, experimental geography, mildred's lane, scott Constable, vernacular, watershed, wowhaus

the scow schooner Annie L, built in 1900 by Emil Munder, unloading hay in San Francisco

As hay bales begin to dot the fields I’m reminded how little the landscape of West Sonoma County has changed since the late 19th century, when scow schooners still sailed down the rivers to deliver cargoes of hay, timber and other agricultural goods harvested nearby to the City on the Bay. It doesn’t take much effort for my thoughts to drift to boat-building and water-born voyages, especially as I prepare for my residency at Mildred’s Lane, near the Delaware.

I’ve always preferred work boats to yachts, especially simple barges like the scow schooner pictured at top, designed for shallow draft and to carry a heavy load under sail. The most primitive vessel of this type, a shanty boat with no power train, designed to drift down a river, is prosaically described by Harlan Hubbard in his classic book, Shanty Boat (1953, Dodd, Mead & Company), which I am currently re-reading  and highly recommend. The memoir chronicles five years of the lives of the artists Harlan and Anna Hubbard, who spent two years building a boat and three years drifting it down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans:

“I had no theories to prove. I merely wanted to try living by my own hands, independent as far as possible from a system of division of labor in which the participant loses most of the pleasure of making and growing things for himself.” (excerpt from ‘Shanty Boat’ by Harlan Hubbard (1953, Dodd, Mead & Co.)

This all has me revisiting my old notes and boat-building literature for the right vessel to build to meet the challenges of nearby waterways, which is very much my default mode.

sketch of an idea from 1999 for a light weight, inexpensive ‘collapsing barge’ to reach distant waterways overland

Tagged: boat building, deep craft, harlan hubbard, mildred's lane, scow schooner, shanty boat, west sonoma county

naturalist/essayist John Burroughs

In preparation for my residency and lecture at Mildred’s Lane late next month, I’ve been studying the upper Delaware River, reading about its history and looking at maps. I was struck by a passage by the nineteenth century American naturalist/essayist John Burroughs, describing a boyhood trip down the Delaware in his book Afoot and Afloat, originally published in 1871. He had just built his own boat for the journey:

“The boat-building warmed the blood; it made the germ take; it whetted my appetite for the voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to fortune, like earning the right to your tools. In most enterprises the temptation is always to begin too far along; we want to start where somebody else leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before they go a-fishing, -how they bring in the trout; and those hunters who run their own bullets or make their own cartridges, -the game is already mortgaged to them.”

the upper Delaware River, at Narrowsburg, PA

Mildred’s Lane is a few miles to the Southwest of Narrowsburg, PA, on a stream that connects to the Delaware River. Burroughs began his journey further upstream and to the East, on the Pepacton branch of the river, now the Pepacton Reservoir.  If time allowed, I would love to build a boat and recreate Burroughs’ boyhood voyage during my residency. As it is, my project will focus on the watershed ecology surrounding Mildred’s Lane, encouraging students to “Go back to the stump”.

Tagged: conservation, deep craft, delaware river, john burroughs, mildred's lane, scott Constable

Spending time among trees helps in my thinking as I develop a portable, ultralight treepod to use as a dwelling during my residency at Mildred’s Lane. Like a folding kayak, the unit would disassemble, packing into two backpacks to be brought to remote sites. The treepod would have integral solar panels on the roof, and would harvest rainwater for an outdoor shower and collapsible, fabric sink inside.

Tagged: mildred's lane, portable architecture, portable dwelling, tents, tree house