Ethos of Making
Funny how nostalgia works.
In the wowhaus (my tiny urban garden studio and namesake for www.thewowhaus.com) I missed the wild raging sea. Now that we live in a forest by the coast, I miss being in my cozy wowhaus, missing something like what I now actually have.


I had to hit the ground running upon my return home from travels abroad. Ene and I were scheduled to deliver the furnishings I made for the new Edible Schoolyard Dining Commons, and I had just one week to pull everything out of storage and prepare for final assembly and installation.
The building’s completion had been delayed by about two years and the furniture had gained character as it patiently sat in stacks in the dry corners of our barn. I realized I don’t really ‘see’ the furniture as I am making it; I am too absorbed in the structural program, of which the ‘look’ is a function. So I was delighted to have had the time pass and to finally get to see it again for the first time and set it all in motion towards finally being used.
I’ll be unpacking the backstory of this furniture project in detail in a publication I’m developing, but will briefly outline the arc of the project here in order to ease its integration into daily use. Being such a high profile and unprecedented endeavor, part of my job as maker and designer is to parse the public perception of this furniture from my underlying motivation and intentions for bringing it into being.
The common public perception is that filling a dining hall at a public middle school with beautiful, handmade furniture is both a foolhardy waste of effort and a misplaced act of elitist gravitas.
My counter argument is two-fold. First, what better place to exhibit beauty and radical generosity than where our kids daily interact in public, especially over a meal featuring food they had a hand in growing? My experience shows me that when treated with grace and respect, kids most often act in kind. To this end, the furniture is a challenge to establish a replicable standard of comportment at the scale of everyday interaction; manners can be embodied in things.
Secondly, that the presence of handmade things in public places is considered elitist is simply an indication of craft being out of sync with consumer culture. The design program for the furniture flows from a paradigm of poverty, of making the most with the least, a tenet with parallels in Slow Food.
All of the wood for the furniture comes from native trees within a 100 mile radius, cut and air-dried by my friend Evan Shively in Marshal, California. Evan culled all of the wood from short logs salvaged from a destiny as firewood, which gave me a good price as well as strict design parameters. For example, the table tops have extra wide ‘breadboard’ ends to add adequate length to the relatively short slabs cut from logs with no great commercial potential otherwise.
Beginning in late 2004, I made 32 tables of black walnut, bay laurel, monterey cypress, eucalyptus, madrone and elm; 140 stacking stools and 80 benches of bay laurel. The furniture will help model a statewide school lunch initiative, hosting 1000 meals a day at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California.


I’ve been a wooden boat enthusiast for over twenty years, so jumped at the opportunity to crew aboard my friend’s recently launched, Herreshoff-designed Buzzards Bay 30 in this year’s Eggamoggin Reach Regatta in and around Penobscot Bay. I flew into Maine from Oslo on a disorienting sequence of flights and arrived at the Belfast City Dock at 3 AM, taking a taxi from the Bangor airport. I slept aboard the tender BURMA for a few hours and awoke to find the fleet of three Buzzards Bay 30s docked to our starboard, about 100 yards from French and Webb Boatworks where they were launched the previous month following a two year restoration to their original, 1902 condition.
The all-wood Eggamoggin Reach Regatta is preceeded by three ‘feeder races’ which allows for the full fleet to gather and for the crews to reunite on and off the water in anticipation of the final race. Aboard the ‘Quakeress II’ we raced from Belfast to Castine on the first leg, working out how to move as a crew of six, learning the ropes and getting a feel for how the boat handles under sail. Todd French (of French and Webb) served as our sailing expert, navigator and all-around ‘salty dog’, which gave me a chance to learn firsthand about the boat’s construction and history, lending perspective as we sailed from port to port along Penobscot Bay’s maritime shores. I was thrilled to be included in the unique historic moment of the revival of the remaining class of Buzzards Bay 30s in the heart of America’s wooden boat culture. The tedious restoration of the Herreshoff fleet is featured in a recent WoodenBoat Magazine article by Maynard Bray, who we met frequently as he tailed the fleet in his lovely ‘Handy Billy’ launch, gathering notes for a soon to be published follow-up.
Maynard Bray aboard his ‘Handy Billy’ launch
Though immensely impressed with the sheer beauty and artistry in wood evident in the revived Herreshoffs, I was initially guardedly cynical about the intentions underlying their restoration. One of our crew who had worked on the boats summed up my apprehensions perfectly when he said:
Perfection is impossible to maintain.
Given the unlimited resources available for the project, the completed boats approach fetishism in the level of detail attained, which suggests one of two things; either an invitation for disappointment and constant maintenance, or a kind of spiritual abstraction, a physical manifestation of the purist ideology underlying the cult of wooden boats. The level of craftwork behind such a restoration is no longer necessary for utility or economy, so the endeavor becomes an exercise in pure aesthetics. Traditional boat-building is a kind of reenactment of or homage to a time when the material technology was in sync with the intended use of its by-products. In 1902, these were highly innovative designs, and Herreshoff’s shop knocked off a fleet of 14 in 5 months time, which I doubt were this lovingly detailed (though I’m sure they functioned as well).
As we sailed and raced from Castine to Camden; Camden to Brooklin and finally in the Eggamoggin Reach, under conditions ranging from light rain to heavy fog with light winds, I gained a new perspective as our crew got in sync and the boat asserted itself on our collective consciousness. The emphasis shifted to the vessel’s social dynamic, and our collaborative efforts seemed a logical extension of the boat’s design and aesthetics.
In spite of the logistics of tacking through a fleet of up to 100 wooden boats through narrow channels, our crew was silenced by the natural world surrounding us and gave in to the slowly emerging consciousness of the boat itself, our temporary home. As the crew acclimated to the the boat’s formal constraints, we became finely tuned to the seals, porpoises, schools of herring, migratory birds and signs of gusts of wind on the horizon. We placed first among our fleet of BB30s in the Eggamoggin Reach Regatta by raising our centerboard and surfing the current as others surrounding us raised spinnakers in the vain hope for more wind. Hats off to Herreshoff!


The architecture and wood craft of the rural reaches of this region are remarkably consistent and appear not to have changed for centuries. Traditional wooden houses combine areas for livestock and threshing alongside living quarters under one roof. Roofing in this region consists of thin split shingles of aspen, overlapping in alternating rows, making silvery fish scale patterns in the reflected sunlight. Well-tended gardens abound and are loaded with strawberries, currants, vegetables and flowers.
Indeed, flowers and other ephemera seem to have more of a hold on the native Estonian imagination than the constructed environment. Even within the cities and towns, flower shops are everywhere and flowers are considered an essential element of exchange in visiting friends and family. That Estonia maintains its roots in its craft-based heritage is evident in the formal greeting “Koitas sinu kassi kahib”, which translates as “How does your hand go?”. Old crafts seem to be very much alive, with subtle shifts from region to region. This is perhaps most evident in the textiles of traditional costume, which are almost like a woven ‘score’ for a region’s abundant songs and dances. Estonians have carefully guarded thousands of songs over the centuries which are sung collectively at song festivals, the largest occurring every four years in Tallin with up to 300,000 people in attendance.
The traditional songs and dances of Estonia truly are the soul of the country, like a long-guarded secret code that holds the key to Estonia’s past but might also inform its uncertain future. I’m curious to learn if there are specific songs related to certain kinds of work, like an archive of craft instruction. This would help to explain the unfaltering consistency of a region’s craft and architecture. Songs appear to be Estonia’s Deep Craft.


Founded as a walled city on a natural harbor in the 13th Century, Tallinn was originally built by the Hansiatic League as part of a network of Northern European fortified towns, unified against the threat of Viking attack. Estonia has ever since been under Danish, Swedish, German and Russian control, with only about twenty consecutive years of independance until 1991. Today, Tallinn reflects its medievel roots but is also home to significant examples of architecture from every century since its inception. After WWII, Estonia’s poverty under Russian control prevented the kind of development that transformed other more prosperous cities, so Vana Linn (Old Town) remains largely unaltered, and has become a major tourist destination for global travellers.
Despite its recent independence and lurch into capitalism as the rising star of the European Union, Estonia remains a folk culture at its core. The major challenge for the next generation will be in managing growth without losing its traditions, which have mostly remained intact due to a long history of foreign control and oppression. Tallinn perfectly captures the emerging Estonian spirit.
Ene’s mother and grandparents left Estonia after WWII, after having spent five years in a work camp during German occupancy. Jaan Kitzberg, Ene’s grandfather, was a prominent newspaper editor whose father, August Kitzberg, was a well known playwright around the turn of the last century. His plays are synonymous with an early modernist movement in Estonia, and cast a contemporary interpretation of the country’s ancient folklore. Kitzberg’s work is still performed and he is recognized as among 100 major contributors to Estonian culture in the 20th century.
We were generously hosted by Ene’s relatives in Tallinn, all of whom share links to August Kitzberg. We travelled south across the country to the coastal city of Paarnu, then continued east to visit the birthplace and museum of August Kitzberg. Leaving Tallinn, the countryside opens up almost immediately, with vast expanses of flat farmland rimmed by dense forests of pine and birch. The few villages and farmhouses appear unchanged since pre-modern times, in sharp contrast to the adolescent sparkle of Tallinn’s new center. Despite its serenely sparse beauty, Estonia’s rural interior has an overwhelming sense of loss and oppression, and is dotted with the occassional carcass of brutalist Russian infrastructure decaying like abandoned spaceships from 1950’s science fiction.
I’m still processing our amazing time in Estonia as I sit in Unni’s apartment in Oslo on my way to Maine, and will be adding images and commentary in the coming weeks. We met with the curator at Tallinn’s new contemporary art museum, and will be developing a project to coincide with Tallinn’s upcoming stature as ‘cultural capital’ of Europe in 2011.


We left Tvedestrand for Oslo for two nights on our way to Estonia, leaving just enough time to take in the city and visit museums. With the dollar weak, Oslo is disarmingly expensive and we were lucky to have Unni’s apartment to ourselves, living on bolle, salami, apples and potato salad as we navigated the city on foot, by ferry and bus. We spent a rainy day at Bygdoy, Oslo’s museum district and home to an astounding collection of artifacts and reconstructions reflecting Norway’s rich maritime and agricultural history. Within a few square kilometers are the Viking Museum, Maritime Museum, Kon Tiki Museum and the extensive Norse Folk Museum.
Wood has been integral to the development of Norse culture, whose technological crown jewel is the Viking ship. Seeing these in the context of folk culture and architecture, I was able to get the perspective of the Viking ship as the culmination of thousands of years of slow improvements in wood technology used in home construction, which evolved from roughly-shaped, stacked logs to frameworks of joined timbers with split boards as siding. I was also able to see the Viking ship as a hybrid invention combining the subtractive shaping of a ‘dugout’ boat with the additive assemblage of an open raft, both vessels being in wide use throughout the region’s prehistory. The resulting keel-boat literally opened up new worlds to the Norsk, and the type of craft continues to evolve to this day. It was truly inspiring for me to witness the concrete manifestation of a culture’s collective effort in woodcraft as pure innovation and as a progenitor of global exploration (and of the exploitation synonymous with the Viking legacy). I was reminded of another adage I’ve developed in my own work:
All vessels originate with an imagined voyage. The best work flows from the desire for a kind of interaction and not from the work for its own sake.
I can think of no better example of this adage than in the work of Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer, ethnographer and author. I first saw his films as a kid when my father would drop me off at the UPenn Museum of Anthropology while he made his rounds as Director of Student Health in the late sixties/ early seventies. I was impressed how science could employ traditional craft to make a significant statement and the sheer gumption it took to pull it off. I continue to read Kon-Tiki for inspiration and hold his collective work as a paradigm of Deep Craft.


I arrived in Norway last week to meet Ene and Aili and a group of friends gathering from around the world to celebrate our friend Wencke’s 50th birthday. Wencke was hosting the group on her family’s compound in Tvederstand, a tranquil hamlet of wooden buildings on a fjord about 220 kilimeters South of Oslo.
Tvederstrand developed in the nineteenth century as a shipbuilding center and has retained its maritime character despite having transitioned into a vacation town for Norwegians on summer holiday. Wencke spends summers living in her family’s old furniture factory overlooking the fjord, which she and her husband (both architects) have converted into an open, rustic house, with ample room for guests. Wencke spent her childhood in Tvederstrand and her family stil owns the hill on the side of the fjord opposite town, including a cluster of houses and a still functioning furniture factory called Solfjeld Mobler, which her brother Osbjorn oversees to this day.
Wencke showed me her father’s ledgers from the factory in the 1940’s and ’50’s and shared her childhood memories of the building when furniture was made there, with cotton batting everywhere and the stuffy smell of burlap and raw wood. in the loft. Osbjorn still uses local woods in the kitchen cabinets and windows now made by Solfjeld Mobler, consisting mainly of pine but to a lesser degree maple, cherry and ash.
Pine is everywhere in Tvederstrand, and features prominently in the town’s maritime heritage. Whether the simplest out-building or most elaborate Inn, the old buildings in the town center are built almost entirely out of pine on cut stone foundations, with tile roofs of Dutch clay. I could imagine great stacks of rough pine floating into the fjord on wooden ships, with clear boards culled for building boats and knotty ones for buildings.
Board and batten over timber frame construction is the preferred design language, befitting a Northern clime with a short building season and harsh winter. The pine is traditionally washed with zinc white to protect it from the elements. With the aid of a blanket of snow, the white wash also reflects back light, which is in short supply during the brief days of winter.
Like many Norwegians, Osbjorn Solfjeld is an avid sailor and told me of the traditional Sjekte (pronounced See-yehk-teh) still in production on the fjord. A sturdy, stout double-ender, the Sjekte are descendants of the Viking longboats, adapted over time to local conditions. They are ‘clinker built’ of clear pine over steam bent frames and perfectly capture the Norsk spirit. Similar hulls are to be found on fjords throughout Norway, with minor variations reflected in the different names given them, sometimes on the same fjord.