the 30′ long table returns home, after weathering 5 years at the Sonoma County Museum

When we first moved our home and main studio to West Sonoma County five years ago, Ene and I were commissioned to participate in an exhibition called Hybrid Fields at the Sonoma County Museum, curated by our friend Patricia Watts. We had been milling several storm fallen Douglas Fir trees on our property at the time and proposed installing a 30′ long harvest table constructed of rough timbers for the exhibition, to be sited on a lawn adjacent to the museum. We called the project Tree Trust True and organized a public feast featuring local foods that all grow on trees for the exhibition’s opening. The event lasted just one afternoon and evening, but the table remained at the museum for the next five years, becoming a popular spot for lunches and impromptu gatherings, weathering like a giant piece of driftwood.

The table is constructed of stacked and pinned timbers, topped off with 6″ thick slabs

We recently decided to bring the table back home, return it to the site where the tree originally grew. With the help of our capable friends Hus, Rob and Angel, we disassembled the table, loaded the parts onto a 16′ flatbed truck and reassembled it back at the wowhaus compound, where it will serve as the primary site for an ongoing series of secret dinners we’ve been planning, featuring guest chefs and handcrafted tableware. The first of these is tentatively planned for October First, with chef Leif Hedendal at the helm.

Angel, Rob, Hus and Scott unload the truck

Angel, Hus, Scott and Rob assemble the table, pinning the timbers with long screws

Installation complete, the crew takes a break to savor Ene’s homemade Pozole

ENE’S POZOLE
• Saute one chopped onion, 1/2 tsp cumin and salt and pepper to taste, in olive
oil. Add to the water in the pot, as described below:
• Place a whole chicken in a pot and add enough water to fill the pot double the
height of the chicken + 8 sprigs of fresh oregano; simmer for at least 2 hours,
preferably longer, at least until the meat falls away from the bone.  Add water
as needed along with 4 cups of canned hominy. Simmer until flavors blend.
• Clean the meat from the bones; add more fresh oregano and cumin to taste, if
desired.
• Squeeze in fresh lime to taste or serve as a garnish

Serve with the following as garnish:
• Chopped Avocado
• Fresh lime slices
• Sliced jalapeno peppers
•  Salsa
• Chips or toasted tortillas can be eaten on the side, but we like to add them to the soup as well….

Enjoy!

Tagged: contemporary art, deep craft, furniture design, innovation, leif hedendal, pozole recipe, scott Constable, slow food, sonoma county museum, wowhaus

The Occidental Yacht Club in 2009, before it began to seriously buckle

Maybe the Occidental Yacht Club was not such a great idea to begin with. At six hundred feet above sea level, the town of Occidental is a dozen winding miles down to the cliffs and breaks of Sonoma’s unforgiving shores. While I have yet to hear the story of the building’s true origins, I assume an element of comedy was at play, which only adds a veil of elegance to the building’s slow decay.

We’ve been watching the old red barn collapse since we moved up the ridge five years ago, wondering whether it would be rescued or torn down. When the Occidental Farmers Market is in full swing on Friday evenings during the growing season, the collapsing building has been a kind of secret fort for town kids, a site for hide and seek, ghost stories and games of dare. I’ve never been inside, but I’ve entertained my own fantasies wondering about what happened there, what’s buried under the planks. Understandably, the building has recently been cordoned off, condemned, and is now inaccessible to anyone, which got me thinking about the significance of ruins in our daily lives.

I’ve written before about a pattern common to West Sonoma County, the tendency not to maintain old outbuildings but leave them to the elements after they become obsolete. As a native Northeasterner, where old agricultural buildings are either carefully maintained, adapted, restored or disassembled, this has been quite an adjustment, despite the romantic visual appeal of distressed barns in the hay meadow.

I’ve since come to understand that poverty connotes an ethos of conservation that is tuned to regional conditions, material resources and a philosophy of labor. For example, the farmers who built barns and outbuildings on this stretch of the West Coast a century and a half ago typically arrived here by sea, and were familiar with the coastal vernacular of New England. Yet they were availed of open land, fair weather, giant straight-grained redwood trees that far surpassed the forests of yore, and the possibility of forging a new identity. The flavor of their subsistence had more to do with self-sufficiency than community, as is reflected in the ethos of their architecture. It was easier and cheaper to build than to maintain, where the opposite was the case in New England, with dwindling resources and land, and unified expectations for social comportment.

I’ve grown accustomed to the dominant attitude of the rural West Coast, especially as it manifests itself in a preponderance of roadside ruins. I believe the tradeoff of allowing for possibility and imagination, even danger, over expectations of tidiness and order speaks for itself.

a recent view of the roof collapsing

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, craft philosophy, deep craft, innovation, occidental, scott Constable, sonoma coast, vernacular architecture

Tagged: beachcombing, california coast, surfing

The view outside Kinnear 205, where we spent the majority of the past two days

Through an orchestrated frenzy of oversized multi-colored post-its, flip books, breakout sessions, brain dumps and debate, we managed to deliver some valuable data and shed light on potential future scenarios for the role of Digital Media Research at the Banff Centre. I applaud all who participated, especially the DMR Director, my old friend Mark Resch, who deftly articulated the Summit’s goals and strategies, and Gavin McGarry, the session’s facilitator and President of Jumpwire Media.

A glimpse inside Kinnear 205 at the Banff Centre’s Digital Media 2020 Summit

Towards the end of the two day Summit, debate turned to the legitimacy of the term ‘digital media’ and what exactly it encompasses. The concensus for now is that it is not at all an apt term but will suffice out of force of habit and in lieu of anything better. When pressed to define ‘digital media’, Sarah Cook, an independent curator based in the UK, said she considered digital media to be any electronically produced product where ‘the means of production and the means of distribution are the same‘. We agreed that this is a paradigm of traditional craft, along with the open source and DIY strategies gaining popularity in digital media.

Tagged: Banff Centre, craft philosophy, deep craft, digital media, DIY, innovation, jumpwire media, mark resch, scott Constable

A tame stretch of the Bow River

I was surprised to wake to a light snowfall after my first night at The Banff Centre. I’ve been invited to participate in the two-day Digital Media 2020 Summit, and arrived a day early to collect myself and orient to this spectacular mountain oasis nestled in the Bourgeau Mountain Range of the Canadian Rockies.

an appealing window display at the Hudson’s Bay Company in downtown Banff

After breakfast I hiked to the town of Banff, toured the Hudson’s Bay Company store and the town’s two skate shops, then continued on to the bank of the Bow River, where I picked up a trail that meandered along its shore, over cliffs and falls to the forest. The air was tinged with sweet cottonwood despite the late season snow, and I felt revived and refreshed from the high altitude exercise.

The Summit will be held at The Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation

The group of 44 participants will assemble for the first time this evening for a general orientation. It’s a diverse crew from an international pool, representing the realms of technology, education, government, business, and cultural production. As the only one present for whom digital media is an adjunct to an art and design practice, I’m happy to be a bit of an outlier to the conversation. As a maker, I see the possibilities inherent in open/crowd sourcing, social networking and cloud streaming as extensions of my toolbox as I design and make tangible things and places. For me, the collaborative, public nature of digital media is very much a contemporary manifestation of a traditional craft ethos and methodology.

In the near future, as more people make more of their lives public, I anticipate the types of innovation in digital media will shift away from the form or interface and towards the content and quality of the narrative, and that technological innovations will increasingly emerge from our collective desire to lead interesting and meaningful lives, especially the more they are on view. I can anticipate an era of bold experimentation in visual narrative.

Tagged: Banff Centre, craft philosophy, deep craft, digital media, digital media 2020, Hudson's Bay Company, innovation, scott Constable, technology

My recently completed House of Tree project, lit by kerosene lamps

I’ve always loved designing and building cabins, and was thrilled to have two simultaneous commissions over the past year and a half, both of which are recently completed. I’d like to design more of these simple, hand-built houses and intend to promote these recent projects, so we hired the architectural photographer Tim Maloney to document them. Tim shot each project in a single day, working closely with Ene, who staged the interiors. I’ve posted my favorite images from each project below, beginning with House of Tree, a tree house/observation tower that I designed for a client in West Sonoma County, built by Tom Holland and Richard Ernst. The second is a Guest House in Marin County, designed by Dotter/Solfjeld Architects, for which I was commissioned to design and build the interior, including all built-in furnishings and fixtures. All images are by Tim Maloney of Santa Rosa-based Technical Imagery. You may learn more about the development of these projects by clicking on the links above.

HOUSE OF TREE:

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Tagged: architecture, cabin, deep craft, scott Constable, sustainability, treehouse, woodworking, wowhaus