Charlotte Perriand

As I searched through the list of designers, by images, for one that I did not know and who's work spoke to me. I discovered the chaise lounge chair of French designer Charlotte Perriond. This chaise has been used in countless design and fashion advertisements for many years. Although it has mostly been used as a prop, the chaise has never faded into the background. The chaise exemplifies simplicity, modernity, luxury, and most importantly comfort.

The B306 chaise lounge chair was designed in 1928!

Born in 1903, Charlotte Perriand went to the Ecole de l'Union Centrale des Arts Decorratifs, in 1920, to study the art of furniture design. After her schooling she went to Charles-Edoward Jeannet, better known as Le Corbusier, enquire about employment in his design firm in Paris. Where she was turned down because he believed women could only embroider. It wasn't until he saw Perriand's roof top bar, that he actually saw what she could do and offered her a job in his company.

Perriand is also credited with introducing the "machine age" to furniture design and therefore to the inside. The "machine age" refers to the movement in the early to mid 1900's that accentuated and emphasized the "industrialness" of the machinery of that era. Such as the developments, like the assembly line, needed for the mass production for the consumerism culture that was just in its infancy. Or like the chrome plating metal process that sped up the time and effort needed to give metal a mirror shine. This can clearly be seen in her use of chrome tubing in the B306 chaise.

After leaving Le Corbusier's studio in '37, Perriand traveled to Japan as an advisor to the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Once there, she helped Japan to develop products that would be more desirable for consumers in the West. As World War II broke out Perriand was kicked out of Japan, but was unable to return to France because of a naval blockade. Because of the blockade, Perriand ended up stuck in Vietnam.

The time spent in Japan and Vietnam was not in vain and later influenced her work after returning to France in '46. She adopted the Japanese technique of using screens to change the space of a room, and also the craftsmanship of the Vietnamese woodworking skills. She created book shelves that divided rooms and translated her chaise into wood.

Perriand also combined the two opposing attributes of her past works, the mass market ability of the "machine age" and the naturalness of wood. She created a wooden stacking chair that needed the cold, "machine age'" assembly line to make it affordable enough for the everyday person, yet contained the warmth of the wood. The chair needed machinery to bend the single piece of plywood into its shape, but it also displayed the proportions and the curves that it give it grace.

Perriand established herself as an architect by designing the United Nation's League of Nations building in Geneva and as a collaborator for the French Tourist Office in London. She also designed a series of ski resorts in her grandparents town of Savoie.

Perriand died at the ripe old age of 96 in 1999; a very accomplished, ground breaking, timeless, tireless, forward thinking, architect, designer, artist, woman.

Wilson Chao - Blogs

Blog #1: Gustav Stickley

The furniture of Gustav Stickley have a certain simplistic beauty.

Stickley wanted to reduce furniture to their simplest form using vertical and horizontal members in a post-an-lintel system. He wanted to enhance his work without sacrificing any structural integrity. So, he looked back to Gothic architecture, where flying buttresses were used both as a structural form and also as ornamental. Stickley despised surface decorations and see them as “a parasite and never fails to absorb the strength of the organism upon which it feeds.” With this view, Stickley looked for methods to reveal existing structural elements as ornamental. As seen in some of his furniture, he extended the tenons all the way through, revealing them. As a result, the joinery is revealed and is both used ornamentally and functionally established as what Stickley called “structural style.”

The furniture are made from oak, either red oak or white oak. This can not be certain is because of the finish applied to the furniture. Stickley wanted the finishing to get “the best possible results from the wood itself as well as the most pleasing effect in completing the color scheme of a room, and never the purpose of imitating a more costly wood in the finish of cheaper one.” He wanted to show the unique beauty in the wood and to show that beauty to the best advantage.

Sickley had a deep rooted nationalistic fervor. This was a key factor in the formulation of his aesthetic philosophy. He saw that America turned to Europe for its art. The result of this were reproductions, art transplanted to an environment unsuited for their nourishment and understanding. The furniture transplanted from Europe does not show the spirit of the American people. While other shops in the early 1900s were filled with reproductions, Stickley set out “to design furniture that would reflect the needs of the American people, not the historical whims of European aristocracy. This was needed because it arose from the democratic form of government and the practical, working-class identity of most Americans. As a result, his furniture would be created for “...the real Americans, deserving, the dignity of this name, since they must always provide the brawn and sinew of the nation...the great mass of American people hav[ing] moderate incomes with an unusual degree of mental cultivation...”

Stickley chose oak as the primary material for his furniture because it was abundant in American forests. As a result, this served as an expression of the natural environment of the people in whom the furniture is made for. He used the wood to its full advantage and he respected it. He saw that it should never be abused or forced into unnatural states.

To this day, Craftsman furniture is still beautiful. It stood up to the test of time.

Bavaro, Joseph J., and Thomas L. Mossman. The Furniture of Gustav Stickley: History, Techniques, Projects. Fresno, CA: Linden Pub., 1996. Print.

Blog #2: Greene and Greene

Greene & Greene and the Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction to the mass production of the Victorian age and the choice to follow John Ruskin's call for a return to hand craftsmanship and nature. “Ruskin saw industrialization as a disease in society and believed that the worker's salvation from the monotony of being a mere aide to a machine was a return to a skilled production by hand, apparent in the historical example of medieval design”.¹ This was taken up passionately by William Morris from Britain. "The British Movement veered off towards the example of 'honest' medieval-style construction, with pegged mortise joints and through dovetails to show how a piece was made."² This resulted in going back to plain surfaces and the use of local materials. The British movement emphasized on hand craftsmanship and away from the factory aesthetic. On the other hand, in the United States, Gustav Stickley's philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement was slightly different. What was different was that Stickley thought that skilled hand crafts can be combined with the use of machinery can be combined to make beautiful works of art. These attributes of the Arts and Crafts movement not only applied to furniture, but to architecture as well. These attributes are obvious in the Blacker House and the Gamble house designed by Charles Greene & Henry Greene in their personal philosophy, the design of both of those homes, and the Japanese influence as an extension of the movement. 

Living in and designing during the Arts and Crafts movement affected the philosophy in which Greene and Greene designed their buildings. Charles Greene suggested three things that every prospective builder should know. The first is that “good work costs much more than poor imitation or factory product.”³ This goes hand in hand with the Arts and Crafts movement's call against the factory aesthetic and back to skilled craftsmanship. The second thing builders should know is “no house however expensive can be a success unless you, the owners, give the matter time and thought enough to know what you want for it.”³ Beautiful architecture takes time to make. The third and final one is “you must employ some one who is broad enough to understand and sympathize with you and your needs and yet has the ability to put them into shape from the artist's point of view.”³ The products resulting from these three philosophies are beautiful homes. In 1912, Henry Greene said “the idea was to eliminate everything unnecessary, to make the whole as direct and simple as possible, but always with the beautiful in mind as the first goal...”⁴ They stripped the decoration to show the beauty of the materials that they used.

Designing buildings during the Arts and Crafts movement, it was only natural that the Blacker House and the Gamble House have elements of Japanese influence. Greene and Greene “drew from both China and Japan, although their idealized vision of Japan was more of an influence.”⁵ In traditional Japanese temples, wood is used in its natural form, without any decoration. The wood is also visible, showing how they give structure to the building. These things are visible in both the Blacker House and the Gamble House. In the Blacker House (fig 1), the wooden post-and-beam supports give structure to the covered terrace on the left and the porte cochere to the right are visible. The wooden supports for the roof extend out, making them visible and as simple decoration on the exterior of the house. The visible supports are on the terrace for the Gamble House (fig 2).

The Arts and Crafts movement and traditional Japanese architecture highly influenced the design of the Gamble House and the Blacker House. Aside from the post-and-beam system that give support to the terrace in both houses, there are many other things on the exterior that show the influences mentioned earlier. The entrance to the Blacker House shows the simple beauty of natural wood, without decoration. The reason for this is that “there is in wood something that stimulates the imagination, its petalous sheen, sinuous grain, delicate shading that age may give to even commonest kind.”⁶ The pattern in the wood panels above the entrance are beautiful. The way the wood was finished, brought out the pattern of the wood. The delicate lines in the woods became visible. This is the same as on the Gamble House entrance way. In both of these houses, there is a sharp contrast in color between the windows and the doors against the exterior. The door frame and the window frames look like natural wood while the shingles lining the exterior look weatherized. It looks like Greene and Greene wanted to have an obvious separation of the exterior and the interior. The windows and the doors are the gate ways to the interior, where almost everything is finished in the same way. The interiors of both the Gamble House and the Blacker House are very similar, since they were built at around the same time. The staircases in these houses are similar. There are exposed mortise and tenon joints, with protruding pegs made of ebony. Any exposed edge throughout the houses were rounded over, making it softer and looking more like hand worked pieces. The rounding helps in giving flow, as in your eyes never stops at any abrupt edge. Throughout the houses, where ever wood was used, it was used in its natural form. There are no surface decoration, the inherit beauty of the woods brought out by the finish.

The Blacker House and the Gamble House have stood up to the test of time. They show the beauty in simplicity. These houses show the obvious attributes of the Arts and Crafts movement. The houses go away from the factory aesthetic and back to quality craftsmanship. Built over a century ago, these houses are still very beautiful.

Fig 1

 

Fig 2

 Fig 3

¹ Jeffery, Michael. Arts and Crafts Style. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications 8

² Andrews, John. Arts and Crafts Furniture. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors' Club 9

³ Smith, Bruce, and Alexander Vertikoff. Greene & Greene: Masterworks. 28

⁴ Smith, Bruce, and Alexander Vertikoff. Greene & Greene: Masterworks. 27

⁵ Smith, Bruce, and Alexander Vertikoff. Greene & Greene: Masterworks. 17

⁶ Bosley, Edward R. Greene & Greene. London: Phaidon 106

Gustav Stickley

Gustav Stickley was the designer of furniture that filled my grandparent’s home. It’s richness in its ability to meld nature with utilitarianism, to strip away the extra froo-froo decoration and embellishment inherent of the Victorian era, leaving elegant simplicity is what makes Stickley furniture so unique.

Gustav Stickley’s love for working in wood began in 1876, when he was eighteen, while working in his uncle’s furniture factory in Pennsylvania, and in 1883 with two of his brothers, formed Stickley Brothers & Company, a furniture manufacturing and retailing firm in New York.

The writings of John Ruskin greatly influenced Gustav Stickley. Ruskin was an art critic also recognized as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist, who wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political economy. According to David Cathers, writer of “Stickley Style”, Ruskin believed that factory goods were inherently inferior to works of skilled craftsman, and he called for a return to the practices of the medieval craft guilds, whereby the craftsman were freer, more creative, and happier than the nineteenth-century factory drudge, and these satisfactions improved his life and work while enhancing the whole of society.

By the 1890s many American followers of Ruskin rejected the ornate, mass-produced wares of the era in favor of the simple and handmade. Arts and Crafts societies were being organized, ushering in the Craftsman style with its elements of functional form, good workmanship, decorative structure, and a respect for natural materials. These were all qualities found in the designs of Gustav Stickley, and he applied this style to interior design, metalwork, textiles, and the design and construction of houses as well as furniture.

Stickley believed that the purpose of a piece of furniture should be immediately apparent in its design, and that furniture be durable and functional for daily use, not just to be admired for its beauty.

His furniture was of solid construction, made of sturdy oak. Stickley insisted that poorly made, poorly designed furniture was destructive of good taste and could actually shape one’s character in a negative way. He made use of tenon-and-key joints, through-tenons pinned with visible dowels, double dovetails, and other forms of exposed joinery. It was solid construction and beautiful at the same time.

Stickley was also very concerned about proportion in his design ideals. Every model produced was studied and tested and modified until it was found thoroughly satisfactory. A chair, for example, was designed to ensure the sitter’s comfort, and also designed at the right height, depth, width, thickness and shape in order to ensure a pleasing visual aesthetic. Stickley recreated the colors and textures of nature and applied them to all of his designs- wood, metal, and textiles.

In 1902, in order to create furniture affordable by the middle-class, he employed two-hundred workers in a factory, and made use of machine processes in combination with skilled hand craftsmanship, an idea opposing his original thoughts of crafting. A few years later he began building Craftsman Farms, a combination of a crafts colony, a school, and a demonstration farm. In 1913 he leased, at a cost of $60,000 a year, a twelve-story Manhattan office tower and opened it as the Craftsman Building. Eight floors were designated as retail space, two floors for offices, a club room, a library, a lecture hall and a Craftsman Restaurant at the top. Unfortunatly, quickly following this, a decline in the popularity of Craftsman wares began and Stickley’s firm went bankrupt in 1915.

Gustav Stickley died in 1942

Class Calendar

168 Calendar Fall 2011

8/24/11            Introduction

                        Video

8/29/11            Shop video

                        Shop walk-through

                        Shop test review

8/31/11           Shop test

                       Demo: crosscut, joint and plane a 2x4

                       

9/5/11              Labour Day, no class

9/7/11              Work time: Milling and ripping (finish for next class)

                        Demo: Rip, cut rabbet, cut bevel

                       

9/12/11            Work time: cut molding, cut bevel

                        Demo: Mitre, glue, spline

9/14/11            Slide show, discussion of purchasing wood

                        Work time

9/19/11            Field trip to Global Hardwood, then Aura Hardwood.

                        Bring back African Mahogany.

9/21/11            Turn in pine frames.

                        Sanding and finishing demo.

                        Begin milling mahogany.

9/26/11            First blog entry due.

                        Mortise-machine demo

                        Tenon demo

                        Work time. Homework: Rip mahogany and make                                                                                     molding.

9/28/11            Work day: mitre cutting, gluing frames.

10/3/11            Spline frames. Homework: sand and finish frames for                                                                         next Monday.

10/5/11            Slides and video, "Making a Shaker Table."

10/10/11          Mahogany frame critique.

                        Discussion of measured drawings. Homework for                                                                                     Monday: make a measured drawing of your table

10/12/11          Figure out wood-buying groups

                        Start milling, marking and mortising 2 x 4 sample

                                   

10/17/11          Mark and cut tenon in 2 x 4 sample. Start dividing up                                                                         and milling the wood for your table frame.

10/19/11          Discuss sample mortise and tenons.

                        Demo: Milling and marking legs

                        Mortising legs

10/24/11          Discuss measured drawings with me.           

                        Begin dividing up boards and milling them

                       

10/26/11          Second blog entry due.

                        Demo: Milling aprons, marking tenons

                        Homework: mill legs and aprons.

10/31/11          Demo: cutting and fitting tenons

                        Biscuit-slots in aprons

                        Work time: mark mortises, cut mortises

11/2/11            Demo: milling and biscuiting top

11/7/11            Demo: gluing up table top

11/9/11            Demo: tapering legs

                        Sanding

11/14/11          Demo: gluing up table assembly (part A.)                       

11/16/11          Demo: gluing up table assembly (part B)                       

Demo:             Demo: Cutting top to size on the sliding table

                        Routing the edge of table top

11/21/11          Demo: final sanding, attaching table top hardware,                                                                                     finishing.

11/23/11          Work!

(Thanksgiving Holiday Thursday and Friday)

11/28/11          Work!

11/30/11          Third blog entry due.

                        Work!

12/5/11            Work!

12/7/11            Final Critique

12/12/11          2.45-5.00 Final Exam day: photo shoot.

Shannon Wright

Blog Post #1
Martin Puryear's Use of Traditional Boatbuilding Techniques In His Sculpture

Folks, this is just an example for how you should do your blog entries. For your second one, go to "edit posts" and add the new one above this one.
-Shannon

Judy Kensley McKie

I did a search for notable women woodworkers and chose Judy Kensley McKie partly because there's an extensive and intimate interview online (http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-judy-kensley-mckie-12483) and because her work involved both furniture and sculpture. Also, she started out by studying graphic arts, which personally appealed to me.

Her father worked for a greeting card company and enjoyed making simple furniture, a hobby he passed on to Judy. Her mother made the greeting cards for the same company. Judy started making small simple pieces like tables for herself after she finished her degree until friends started asking her to make them furniture. She had always had an affinity for building things but she didn't associate this interest as a career focus until later. Painting was her original focus.

She a big figure in the "american studio furniture movement" (1940-1990) which is a period where furniture and art blurred; furniture are one-of-a-kind pieces created in studios.

Her work is characterized by strong forms with whimsy in the treatment of animal/organic forms that recur through her work. She is appreciative of woodworking in other cultures with decorative elements that do not take away from the overall form. She has worked in a large variety of ways with a variety of materials from stone, wood, painting, casting in bronze, etc., and hates to repeat herself.

I thought it was interesting that she started out by making functional, simple furniture "for the people" in a cooperative where she learned from other woodworkers. She then wanted to make them more personal with carvings of animal figures that she still uses today.

I also found that her son was murdered senselessly and she used that experience to create a sculpture to help grieving parents manage their loss. Even during so-called mental breaks, she works to get through the period, often using the material in future pieces.

Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwwnBfyf91uGcw8INSkYlKds6iqhTmo0fP-BXTSTHnBVcT0xbsQiyeJ8yBCd9FOJrzE9X2rJi03wfFIury5Eb_WlBG17GmmJKlsEg1e6g0e7RMpDfPx2eoPmGVcdVCGGyxHbpVSxXjyAjT/s400/abstractheadboardright_web.jpg

Abstract Headboard
carved basswood
40" x 63" x 1 3/4"

Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn51xDVuQCd6C2a70ny1KfGmJtR0ksO2jUneU3awCYEv9Yru8fUpdhjDMAcO2obY49Y-pnKl_R7QZKwBmq-4zuPLDMxXaYov6Rusym_DvTbqEfMPP0P4HrXBka4NV5n-7SbU7AeWLfj72i/s400/tigertable2_web.jpg

Tiger Table
cast bronze
(I had to lift the image from the gallery website because I accidentally deleted my own)

Kaare Klint

Kaare Klint (1888-1954) was an early Danish modernist furniture designer who was inspired by Shaker furniture and who was concerned primarily with the ergonomics and function of furniture. He was the first director of the Copenhagen Art Academy's furniture-making school, building upon his interest in design theory through the activities he chose for his students several of whom also became important furniture designers.

He had his students dissect furniture from the inside out, focusing on use rather than aesthetics. As a craftsman, he also focused on purity of construction and materials which was part of who he was as a design theorist.

"New forms for furniture types should not, according to Kaare Klint, represent a radical break with tradition but should rather be viewed as an evolutionary development of existing forms that had proved their worth. Kaare Klint's teachings formed the basis for the renewal of Danish design after 1945."

During the same period when Bauhaus was denying its historical heritage in order to discover an ideal, Klint embraced history to do the same, focusing on evolving from past furniture designs. He took a long to time to research and prepare the pieces he was creating.

I looked into this furniture designer while exploring George Nakashima and similar modernist designers. I was drawn into Klint's focus on ergonomics and the care he took to make an absolutely functional piece of furniture. I thought it was interesting that he started as a painter because the functional purpose of his work, the core of his work, was also balanced by an aesthetic development.

He looked to earlier pieces of furniture and improved on them functionally while distilling their aesthetics to only modern necessities: no decorations, clean lines, and great materials.

Deck Chair (1933) (source: http://www.danish-furniture.com/images/kaare-klint-deck-chair.jpg)

Safari chair (1933) (Source: http://www.danish-furniture.com/images/kaare-klint-safari-chair.jpg
)