We designed the hardscape to complement Fluke, our bronze whale tail sculpture.

Though the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center has yet to officially open in Santa Cruz, the City has unveiled our Fluke sculpture to satisfy public curiosity. It’s been great fun to see images of people interacting with it, coming up from the beach just across the street to climb Fluke, peek in the windows of the new building, and hang out in the courtyard. This may very well be our most public public project to date.

It’s a welcome surprise to see kids hanging out under the sculpture, lending purpose to the curb, which we reluctantly added as an ADA requirement.

To learn more about the development of our Fluke Project, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: california coast, Fluke, monterey bay exploration center, public art, scott Constable, sculpture, wowhaus

Sand Patterns

Foam Studies

Fog Studies

Tagged: landscape photography

Simple Stool, Simple Chair, for Healdsburg Shed.

I always loved how in comic books when the hero was going through a challenge the thought bubble above his head would have cropped, choppy sentences, in italics, narrating the thought process behind the struggle. Going for extreme simplicity as I continue to design and prototype seating and dining elements as part of my collection for Healdsburg Shed, my thought bubble would be something like, “Must reduce form to pure structure; reduce structure to one repeated part; ease manufacture of part; stack joints..”

The challenge has been to create a harmonious range of seating options to support Shed’s culinary offerings, which range from a coffee bar to intimate dining at small tables along a banquette or at a large community table, to a wine bar, all happening simultaneously under one roof. I’m continuing to champion the themes of transparency and permeability, agricultural vernacular and a kind of generic minimalism, and it’s been exciting to finally see the building go up and be able to see things in context. I think we’re close to having a cogent collection to support the Shed ethos and brand.

My goal has been to design furnishings that meet all functional and aesthetic criteria, but that are easy enough to be made or modified by any decent carpenter or cabinet=maker. I will be making the furniture myself, but I like the idea that the design is implicit in each structure and could be repeated and possibly improved with future iterations, like a folk song, where the idea of the thing is as powerful as the thing itself.

Tagged: aesthetics, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, healdsburg shed, scott Constable, vernacular, woodworking

I’m very grateful to Kirsten Dirksen for making such an elegant little documentary about my House of Tree project, which she recently posted on her website, faircompanies.com. When she contacted me over the winter holidays about wanting to interview me about Deep Craft, wowhaus and House of Tree, I had not visited her website or seen any of her work, so I was surprised and delighted to learn that her focus is on small scale, portable and alternative architecture.

I spent a lively day in early January hanging out with Kirsten and her husband, Nicolas as they peppered me with insightful questions and shot stills and video. The House of Tree piece was filmed at the end of the day as the sun was setting, after we had toured our studio compound. I’ll be anxious to see the video Kirsten posts about her visit to wowhaus headquarters.

To see the video and read Kirsten’s excellent commentary on faircompanies.com, please click here.

Tagged: architecture, deep craft, faircompanies.com, fred reid, green design, kirsten dirksen, scott Constable, sustainability, tree house, wowhaus

John Constable produced most of his ‘Cloud Studies’ between 1820-22

My old friend Anthony Bevilacqua and I share an affection for the paintings of John Constable, particularly his Cloud Studies and other oil sketches. I have yet to see any of these in person and hadn’t looked at them in a while until Anthony sent the three plates above on my birthday last week. Coincidentally, my dad also sent me a beautiful little survey of Constable’s work published by Barnes and Noble in 1963, the year of my birth.

As a believer in the power of coincidence, especially when stacked, I took it as a sign to explore Constable’s work in earnest, having never done so. Though I lack any genealogical evidence, my family has always asserted that the artist is a distant relative so in some ways I’ve taken his work for granted. The book my dad sent, with text by the great art historian Phoebe Pool, provides sympathetic insight into Constable’s legacy and a few quotes by the artist that shed light on his approach to painting as a logical extension of natural science.

Although he worked hard to achieve recognition by, and acceptance into The Royal Academy, Constable was way ahead of his time on many levels and his best and most influential works may just be the oil sketches he produced throughout his career, particularly the Cloud Studies executed between 1820-22 in his native Suffolk. Here are a few quotes by John Constable:

“In such an age as this, painting should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, not considered only as poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit, legitimate, scientific and mechanical… Imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities.”

“If the sky is obtrusive as mine are it is bad; but if it is evaded as mine are not, it is worse; it must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key-note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.”

“My pictures will never be popular, for they have no ‘handling’ but I do not see ‘handling’ in nature.”

“We see nothing truly until we understand it.”

“Can it be wondered at that I paint continual storms- ‘Tempest o’er tempest rolled’? Still the darkness is majestic and I have not to accuse myself of ever having prostituted the moral feeling of Art… My canvas soothes me into a forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly and worse.”

Tagged: aesthetics, art quotes, deep craft, John Constable, landscape painting

Sand Patterns 7

Tagged: deep craft, landscape, photography, sand patterns, scott Constable, sonoma coast

As artisans we’re often compelled to make things that last, for obvious reasons. If the thing is functional we don’t want out efforts to be wasted; we want the functionality to remain in tact over time, hopefully adding to a thing’s value. If a thing is purely aesthetic, we want its beauty and meaning to translate across spans of time beyond our reach. What makes something last is all the more compelling in an age of rapidly changing technology, infrastructure and economies, where obsolescence becomes almost an intrinsic value to any manufactured thing.

I’m particularly drawn to things that were made to last that retain their beauty and functionality despite their obsolescence- barns, tools, scientific apparatus, even weapons- and find myself searching for persistent patterns that might apply to making anything of relevance to contemporary life. Here is a little glimpse of my findings related to what makes something last:

Historically, things made to last are a distillation and/or embodiment of a set of cultural values that, by mining accumulated knowledge, project forward, assuming they (the values) will remain relevant. I can think of three cases of the above:

• architecture and hard goods (furnishings and other functional or domestic objects)
• technology and hardware
• information/publication/knowledge

Each of these can be parsed out into two general categories:

• those that allow for adaptation and improvement through maintenance and use
• those that are locked in to any combined set of beliefs, labor practices and assumptions about material resources

The first grouping would be epitomized by concepts like open source, crowd source and constitutions of binding laws, but are only occasionally manifest in the built environment unless at the service of public safety (building codes). The second grouping constitutes a more monolithic capture of a particular time and place where the same factors of labor, material and use are frozen for the ages, with varying degrees of adaptability- barns, tools, weapons, energy production, etc.. Ideally, making something that lasts today hybridizes the two groupings by taking into account the dynamic interplay of variables like labor, material, distribution and patterns of use, with the added goal of minimizing waste and energy consumption in the process.

Things will last that have the capacity to change or resist change in sync with or in anticipation of the ideas and values they embody, which is an argument for simplicity.

Tagged: aesthetics, craft philosophy, deep craft, design, sustainability

Sand Patterns 6

Tagged: aesthetics, deep craft, landscape photography, sand patterns, scott Constable, sonoma coast

Jack worked with Luther Burbank to develop a cactus to feed livestock.

I don’t know why it’s taken me twenty years to pay homage to Jack London’s homestead in Sonoma, but the wait was more than worth it, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of the agricultural side of the great writer. Having achieved literary stardom by the time he decided to settle down, London positioned his career as a populist writer/lecturer to support his agricultural experiments, most of which were way ahead of their time and in common practice today. He seems to have been most influenced by his travels to Asia, having seen firsthand the Chinese practice of terracing to conserve water. He raised horses and other livestock and collaborated with Luther Burbank to develop cacti as livestock feed, a failed experiment influenced by practices he witnessed in Hawaii while cruising the Pacific on board his ketch, the Snark.

Jack slept on a sun porch, smoking and writing into the wee hours.

I love his system for keeping track of notes.

I love his writing desk that looks like two up-turned fruit crates with a slab on top.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, jack london, luther burbank

I designed my 118 SF  barn to accommodate three Oberhaslis goats in comfort.

I’ve been having a lot of fun designing a tiny barn to house three Oberhaslis goats for the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley. The project is just a schematic concept thus far, but will not require much more design if I get the proportions about right. I love to design little buildings, the more utilitarian the better, especially when in support of urban agriculture. It’s been about 14 years since I designed and built the Tool Barn for the Edible Schoolyard, so I’m happy to have a chance to add a companion structure to the program. If the goat barn project is funded, I’ll most likely build it myself from trees felled and milled on our property over the summer. For now, the concept flows easily from my sharpened pencil on graph paper at 1/4″= 1′-0″ scale, my favorite way to begin any project.

The nototriously quiet Oberhaslis goat will need to be milked twice a day.

Tagged: deep craft, edible schoolyard, goat barn, Oberhaslis, phenology, scott Constable, urban agriculture, vernacular architecture, wowhaus