hoosier cabinets

we had some good friends over a couple of nights ago. One of them pointed at the Hoosier cabinet in our kitchen and said "that's a nice piece. Did you just buy it?" With a pride that surprised me I said "No, it was a wedding gift to my great grandmother."

I love Hoosier cabinets. They are one of the few distinctly American pieces of furniture. They were not made or used anywhere else in the world, but in the early part of the 20th century were seen in many (especially Midwestern) kitchens. Named after the Hoosier Manufacturing Company, they were already in major production by 1903, though some historians make convincing arguments for them being popular in the late nineteenth century. Other companies made their own versions of the cabinet, which is what we have. Ours is not a Hoosier Brand, but we love it nonetheless.

In a time before kitchen cabinets as we think of them, storage and work space in kitchens was scarce, which is weird for us to think about. Imagine a kitchen without the now-ubiquitous cabinets and sink, maybe just a table and a sink with a hand pump for water. Now imagine making dinner for a farm family of eight or so. No wonder these cabinets were so popular.

Like many cabinets of this style, Bama's cabinet has slide-out cutting boards just below the countertop, scored with years of slicing and chopping in the pursuit of dinner:

The counter top, incidentally, is a 1950's replacement. Originally this cabinet (like most Hoosier Cabinets) probably had an enameled steel counter top. When these got chipped the steel started to rust, which is probably why it was replaced with the Formica one.

There are also a bunch of

different drawers, with a bunch of different implied functions. We use the potato and onion drawer for its intended purpose, which it still fulfills all these decades later.

This is not a million-dollar antique. Even in pristine condition these are not furniture objects that fetch huge price tags. But this is where "value" and "worth" take on different meanings. Of course I would never sell the cabinet. It IS a million dollar cabinet to us, because it is shiny with thousands of openings by Bama, and by my Grandmother, and my father as a little boy, and now us. As Thomas grows, he will be able to use his Great-Great Grandmother's cabinet, and add the polish of his hands and the weight of his use. Eventually, I will repair the sagging middle drawer support, taking on, as I have, the responsibility of maintaing this particular object in the museum. And so the work of my hands, the love of my family, and my reverence for the past and the future also get woven into this humble cabinet.

Now, THAT is worth a million dollars. And I feel lucky to be the curator of this branch of the museum.

saturday

i got this email from a colleague a couple of weeks ago:

Hello Zeke-

I had a large hickory taken down in my side yard today. My friend with the mobile mill could saw it up for you if you want to buy it. Don’t know how many board feet yet. It was a bit dark by the time I got home so I’ll pace it off in the morning.


Best-
Don

Well, of course I wanted to buy it. Last Friday night I went over to his house and helped him roll four huge chunks of tree down the hill around a couple of trees to an access road on his property. It was a solid couple of hours of work, freshly cut trees are filled with water and VERY HEAVY. We figure it was a couple of tons of wood at least. This hickory had been growing for a hundred years in a stand of forest, and had been reaching reaching reaching to get at the sun, so the trunk was long and straight as an arrow, perfect for making into lumber. When we got the four pieces of trunk to their final resting place they looked like this:

The place they came from is about halfway up the hill, which does not seem that far away in the photo, but trust me it was a feat to move these logs around. Yesterday I met George Chrysler. George is a tool maker for a local tool and die company, and "for fun" owns a portable saw mill called a Wood Mizer. Here is George having fun:

A Wood Mizer is a saw mill made by a company in Indianapolis. Their motto is "Making Dreams Come True," and they sure are doing that for me. A Wood Mizer saw mill is made to be towed behind a pickup truck, and George's can handle logs that are 30" in diameter and fourteen or sixteen feet long. Big logs. My hundred-year-old- hickory tree was not quite so big, but it was a pretty good size, about twenty inches in diameter at the base.

So on a beautiful, sun dappled, cool autumn Saturday morning, I meet George out in the woods, and we get started. We had a six hour conversation as we turned a tree into dimensional lumber, about the saw mill itself, about trees, about how I was going to use the lumber, about whether it was more important to get as much lumber as possible or to get more interesting boards. A good time was had by both, I think. And I got to be a part of choosing how the log was made into boards, specifying that some of it be cut for table tops, and other parts to be cut thinner, or thicker. We would turn the logs this way and that to get the best cut, or we would just start at the top of the log and work our way down, slabbing the entire tree into planks.

It was, I have to say, way better than a party. Here is a short video of one way to make lumber:

Here is a video from the other side:

By three o'clock in the afternoon, we had made quite a pile of hickory boards, with its white sapwood and fleshy pink heartwood seeing the air for the first time ever. Hickory has a slightly sour but sweet smell when you cut it, and that smell hung over the whole area as the sawdust swirled in the sun and the breeze and the stack of wood got higher and higher.

Next weekend I will move the pile somewhere that it can sit and season, which will likely take two years or more, unless I dry it in a kiln. Then it will be ready to make into tables and cabinets and benches and shelves, objects "of use" or of beauty that we hope will last another hundred years or more.

Throughout this process I could not help but be put in mind of the way boards were made not long before this tree was planted. The image of a man standing on top of the log and another standing underneath it and sawing by hand board after board was in the front of my mind all day, the realisation that what were doing with the Wood Mizer in forty five seconds at one time would have taken two men the better part of an hour. That looked like this:

I felt lucky to be where I was, to be surrounded by people that understand the importance of what Eric Sloan calls "The Reverence for Wood," to be given the gift of involvement in the process in this way. So few woodworkers or furniture people see the material they use as trees, or live with them through the becoming process, all the way down to the finished object. It is a special responsibility I feel, and a heavy one, to do this tree proud, now that I have been part of making it into lumber. The thing that I try to impart to my students is this, though: All the wood around us came from trees. Even the particleboard. Even the two-by-fours that you can not see behind the sheetrock in the wall of the room you are sitting in. All of the steel was ripped from underground. All of the copper in this computer had a genesis and a venerable life.

Losing sight of those beginnings, disassociating ourselves from where things come from, weakens our bonds to and our understanding of the importance and the impact of the things around us. Strengthening our connection to raw materials and their genesis helps us to understand how tenuous our grip on the world is, and helps me, at least, remember what my place is, and what my duty is.

class

it has been a long time since I have written here. A lot has happened, and I have mostly been trying to keep my head above water. This has been (barely) possible. Now it is a cool early Saturday morning, and I am up, because this is when I wake up these days, and I have been trying to process everything and sort it all into the bins it goes in.

I thought I would write a little bit about the teaching, as that has consumed a lot of my waking hours. It has been grand.

One of my classes is a “Sustainable Furniture and Lighting” class. I am starting to hate the word “sustainable” almost as much as I hate the word “green.” Green, that is, as applies to design or to living. I have no problem with green as a color, or as a party, or as a way to be, if you’re a frog. But these labels get co-opted and twisted until even Wal-Mart is using them and they have no meaning whatsoever and are just words printed on plastic packaging that is shrink-wrapped and shipped from China.

So we had to start out by talking about what “sustainable” is, what it means as it applies to furniture, as it applies to life. We are still talking about it. I hope we will continue to talk about it. Lots to talk about, there. Then we go on to our first project, which is a lighting object. This is where it starts to get good.

Habitat for Humanity has a store here in Syracuse called the Habitat ReStore. If you are doing demolition at your house and have something that is still usable that you are getting rid of, you take it to them and they re-sell it and make a little dough and the object stays in use, rather than going in the landfill. Pretty cool. And people donate all kinds of things. Contractors will donate almost a full pallet of sheetrock, sometimes at the end of a job, or a pile of two-by-fours. Then anyone can walk in and buy the stuff for pennies on the dollar. Everything you can imagine gets donated: sinks, lighting fixtures, hardware, doors, windows, cabinets, anything you can think of. Pretty cool place.

The theme of this particular class, the way we are attacking “sustainability,” is through a process called “upcycling.” Most objects are downcycled, that is, the raw material is ripped out of the ground and refined, then made into an object, used, and thrown away. This is a vertical process that I think of as starting at the top and proceeding down into a landfill. Some objects are recycled, which means that some or all of the material is turned back into its raw state and then used again. I think of this as a more or less horizontal process, though usually the end result is that the material is eventually downcycled.

“Upcycling” is the process of taking an object that has been discarded and moving vertically back up to restore it to a useful state. This is what I have been trying to do in my studio practice, and now I have a captive audience of 20 Industrial Design students to do it with me.

It is, as we used to say, rad.

The project brief is to buy an item at ReStore (giving money to an organization that needs it and supporting the local economy) and make it into a lighting object (getting us used to the idea of upcycling to make an object instead of buying a lot of stuff). Pretty fun stuff, and the students have wholeheartedly embraced it, which is encouraging to see.

Yesterday we met in the shop and I gave a lecture and demonstration about how to wire a lamp. I have wired a lot of lamps in my time, and I feel pretty comfortable leading them through this process. Then I walk into the shop, and there are four IBEW electricians working on the wiring in the shop. And here I am about to tell a bunch of students how to do wiring. Hrm.

I go over to the electricians and say sotto voce “Okay, look. I am about to give a wiring demo to a bunch of students. Do me a favor and don’t laugh at me ‘till they leave.” And we all grin at the absurdity of it, and make a couple of jokes, and now I am just as nervous as I was before, but now they are going to surreptitiously listen as I talk.

Super.

It all goes pretty well. I show the class how electricity runs in a circle, and how if you interrupt that circle the light does not come on. I show them a bunch of different types of plugs and switches, and demo how to carefully strip the plastic jacket off of the wire and crimp a terminal on the end and screw it to the prong in the plug. We look at the insides of different plugs and different switches. We talk about “hot” and “neutral” and “ground.” I introduce them to my friend Teri’s two basic rules of lighting: (1) “Is the damn thing plugged in?” and (2) “Is the damn thing turned on?” They ask some good questions, and then class ends and they all go their ways, off to do whatever it is they do on weekends, which I do not ask about, because I (vaguely) remember my college days, and I figure I don’t need to know.

So I go over to Chad, who is the lead electrician on site, and say, “Well, what do you think? Should I get fired, or was that okay?” And he grins at me and looks at me sort of out of the corner of his eyes and says, “Sounded pretty good to me. I wouldn’t have told them anything different.” I felt ten feet tall.

What excites me about this is that the students seem jazzed, and they are the ones who are going out to design objects for the next generation. If I can get them thinking about responsible design here in school, If I can get it really under their skin and in their blood, what wonderful stuff can they bring to pass when they are out in the world? Super exciting.

hiatus

i apologise for the long hiatus. Even today, I find I have little to write about that pertains to making, per se. As I had known would be the case, I have had to shut down my studio for a while in favor of other endeavors: being a father and teaching.

As I have written here before, teaching is really my calling, I think. I am looking forward to Monday the 31st, which is the first day of classes here at Syracuse University. I have been meeting with colleagues and talking curriculum and teaching style and it has really gotten my juices flowing.

The shop is not up and running yet, though I am feverishly trying to make it happen. As with any large project that is timed within an inch of its life, one thing after another has slowed it down. But it will get there. I am confident of that. When it does I will post photos and write about it. The massive yellow Powermatic tools are all sleeping now, waiting for the electricians to plug them in. Walking through the new shop I can feel the air charged with possibility. Great things will be taught here, and great things will be made.

The biggest thing that has kept me from writing for the last three weeks is the birth of our son and first child, Thomas Beaumont Leonard. He was born on August 13. It has not been easy medically for my wife (though that seems to have passed, thank god), nor has it been an easy transition for us, as all parents can attest. Lot of learning here, lots of change.

So I will write when I can. I hope to write more frequently as the year starts. I hope to make it a part of my professional life. In the meantime, you can see the new babe at methuselahleonard.blogspot.com.

containers

i am packing our house in Providence.  We had made a lot of plans for this move, but the universe is acting very strongly just now to underline to me that my plans, though entertaining, are not of particular interest to it.  Karen and her mother are in Syracuse, and I am here packing.  This is the first time in our lives that I have been more or less solely responsible for our collection of stuff, and though it is profoundly overwhelming, it is giving me a chance to ruminate about some things that have been long buried.

Bachelard writes about objects being containers of memory, and yesterday and today have been experiences that completely support that way of thinking.  Our 11 year history together has imbued some objects with a lot of memories, years of use layered on to the object, causing it to become worn with the use like an old tool.  And some of these are not objects that we handle, you understand.  Use can be defined in a myriad of ways.

Yesterday I came across a little glass vase.  We never keep flowers these days, as our cats treat them as snack bars, but there was a time that I kept fresh flowers in the apartment all the time.  When we got married, Karen’s parents lived in Qatar, and brought these exquisitely delicate little glass vases to put on all the tables as gifts for those who came to the wedding.  We have a couple left that we have (miraculously) not broken, and it was one of these that got packed yesterday.  It has been living on our dining room table for a while now, and every time I look at it I think about our wedding, and our early years and who we were then and who we are now.  Not, maybe, in a conscious way, maybe a more symbolic way, but truly, every time my eyes land on this little object these thoughts flash through my mind. 

That is what I mean by using something without handling it.   The house is full of objects like that.

Then there are the objects that had not seen the light of day in a long time, that bring back a flood of very specific memories.  Deep in the back of the closet I found a pair of black leather pants.  I know you don’t believe this, but I swear it is true.  In about 2000 or 2001 Karen bought these and actually wore them.  I remember this, clear as day.  I remember standing at the top of the stairs in our apartment in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn and her wearing these pants.  We were younger, of course, and in a very different stage in our marriage, and all of that was contained in these pants.  I had supposed that they had been given away years ago, but no, here they were, stiff with non-use, but carefully preserved in the vault of the closet. 

These memories, these histories of us are written in the everyday objects around us.  Everything is a totem in our house, everything is a record-keeper.  I am so careful about and enamored with the process of making because the objects that we make are not anonymous.  They are not disposable.  They are all endowed through their inclusion in our life with great import.

Of course I realize that the objects that are important to me are not necessarily as heavy with memory and meaning to others.  My sister and her wife were here yesterday afternoon helping.  This impromptu packing process has required us to lean heavily on the support of those who love us, and I have been truly thankful to be so blessed with loving family and friends.  As they packed our kitchen and the stoneware that my mother made for us, I watched story after story get carefully wrapped and stowed away, realizing that in some ways it can be helpful not to feel the weight of the history in each object.  For that reason (among others) moves are easier when someone else packs.  They could wrap and put in boxes objects that I would have had to contemplate individually, a process that can take quite a bit of time.

Now I am moving through a maze of some of the most emotionally brutal objects:  boxes taped shut.  

They are the defining aesthetic feature of this space at the moment, and require a different system of navigation, both physically and emotionally.  The speed with which this move came upon us has not given me time to grieve for leaving this space, which has been the most positive space in my life in years.  I have loved being here, and have learned a lot and grown a lot here, all (I think) to the better. Providence is a good city, and this has been a good house.  And I will miss it.  We are moving on to great things, and an exciting new chapter in our lives, and I know that, but this has been a good chapter too, and I feel that it is ending abruptly.  Too abruptly.

So I will put our memories in boxes, trying to be care-full and respect-full not only of the process of this transition, but also the outcome.  I will do this with the knowledge that all of these objects are not leaving our lives, they are coming with us, supporting us, recording for us our paths toward parenthood and a new environment, a new space, a new part of our lives.

slop

at the RISD library there is a room called the “Picture Collection.”  It is one of my favorite places in the whole school, and I recently had an opportunity to show it off to a couple of visiting students, which brought it back to the front of my brain.

It is like the NYPL Picture Collection, for those of you familiar with that.  It is a series of filing cabinets filled with folders, each of which if stuffed with pages torn out of magazines over the years.  Every folder has a subject matter,   so there is a “Sports-Cricket” folder for example.  As well as an “Animals-Cricket” folder.  And a “Furniture-Georgian” and an “Architecture-Korea” and a “Political Personalities.”  The list goes on an on, it fills a 2” binder, neatly typed and cross-referenced.  You find the category you want to look at and ask for the folder, and you can check out up to 50 images at a time to take with you.  Pretty amazing.  You actually get to take these laminated pages with you to use as reference or as inspiration.  I used it all the time when I was in school.

Part of what I love about this analog approach is that it relies on my object recognition rather than a computer’s.  I was talking with an acquaintance the other night about how we recognize images and objects, about the way that we are able to understand (in a way that a computer is not) that an image of a red vase is an image of a red vase whether it is a digital photo with the file name DSC_00000546 or an actual photograph or an actual object (a real red vase, in this example).  The computer (so far) is programmed only to recognize files named “red vase,” and not to be able to see a red vase in an image of a dining table that is named “Dinner at Dave’s house.” (though my acquaintance is of the opinion that it is coming not too far off, a prospect that is intriguing and terrifying at the same time).

But the real thing I love about the Picture Collection is the sloppiness.  As I am looking at these photos I often will see something in the background or in the corner of the page that is intriguing or helpful, something that sends me off down another path in my research.  It can be linear, on the worst days when I am not paying attention, but it is at its strongest when it is circular or ovular or explodes out across a variety of fields and categories.

In the design process, as in life, an amount of slop is not only allowable, it is necessary.  The creative process and the design process demand that our thinking be kept as open as possible for as long as possible, and they tend only to end in a pleasing and satisfying and thoughtful way when we keep away from the straight and narrow.

There is a similar amount of slop in the way that we are built, slop that allows us to stretch and contort in ways that are not in line, strictly speaking, with our direct biological functions.  This lets us do things like yoga and gymnastics, but also allows us to squirm into the bilge to get at a recalcitrant bolt that is ‘way up in a tight little place, for example, or pick one very tiny screw up off the floor where we dropped it.  It also lets us function with one kidney, and to learn to adjust to losing a limb.  The physical slop allows us to learn new ways of functioning, and to constantly grow and adapt.

When Matthew Crawford talks about being a “knowledge worker”  he recounts being forced to adhere to a “knowledge quotient (how’s that for a terrifying phrase?).”  The system that he had to follow, which is like a lot of systems that a lot of us have to follow professionally, did not account for varieties in understanding and thinking.  It required a codifying of thought and action regardless of the situation to the point that the actual product was not only negatively compromised, it was actually, in its way, harmful.  What he experienced was an intellectual version of the Industrialist’s Creed introduced in “Cradle to Cradle:”  If brute force isn’t working, you aren’t using enough of it.

When I am looking at the planks for a new project, I spend a great deal of time laying out the pieces on the raw wood, making time to try many different options before I cut into the raw material and start to give it a new form.  I look at the color and swirl of the grain of the wood, flipping the planks again and again in an effort to give the wood the greatest possible voice, the most harmonious possible outcome.  All thoughtful woodworkers do this, it is a common beginning step, one that enters into the dialogue with the wood that I am always writing about, and that ensures a beautiful finished piece.  Industrially produced furniture often indicates a lack of sensitivity to this step, being more interested in fitting the largest number of final pieces into a given board and sacrificing a pleasing finished object.

The less slop that gets built into system, whether it is a physical system, an intellectual system, or an educational system, the less likely the system will be sustainable over the long term and the more likely that the end result will be less than it could be.  In our desire to codify and systemise, we often lose the very thing we are trying to achieve.

a call to arms

“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Two hundred and thirty three years ago a gentleman planter (who was also an inventor, an amateur woodworker, architect, musician, and goodness knows what else) who was all of thirty six years old penned these words. They were terrible and aggressive words, words that started, of course, a revolution. Now we call it the Revolution. Capital R.

From our remove, it is hard to comprehend what he and the other members of the Continental Congress were doing. When we hear or read the words “high treason” these days they don’t have a lot of teeth. There are not a lot of people committing it in our country, lately. At least, they are not getting prosecuted. But for these men (and yes, they were all men. And white. And rich. That does not diminish the enormity of what they did.) the act of signing their names to this particular document was unambiguously taking a stand for which it was possible, and in fact likely, that they would be tried and hanged.

They were putting their lives on the line to back up their convictions (some more quickly than others, we are moving to the only state that abstained from the first vote, New York. They came around eventually, though), which is another idea that a lot of us here have a hard time understanding. There are folks in other countries that understand it perfectly, and are doing it right now, of course. What would you die for? What would you risk loss of property, prestige and life to say publicly?

I have been thinking about revolution, lately. I have been doing a lot of reading that has got me in that frame of mind (Wendell Berry, McDonough and Braungart, Matthew Crawford, Walter Rose). The revolution that I have in mind is not a political one (though that may not be a bad idea, more on that another time), but a cultural one. And it needs to shake things up as completely as did that document two hundred and thirty three years ago.

What the Continental Congress put together as a result of their revolution was a completely unheard-of system, one that they believed to be better than any existing system. They did not have any examples to follow, all they had was their knowledge that the existing system was broken, and that something new was needed. That is where I feel that we are.

Ecologically, we are juggling bowling balls while treading water in a lake that is on fire. Many of the solutions that are being put forth involve putting on a fire-retardant suit, a solution that does nothing at all to change the basic situation, it merely keeps our hair from getting singed before we drown.

The system is broken. Something new is needed. That something new is not an object, I don’t think, especially as they tend to come wrapped in plastic inside a box that is shrink-wrapped. It probably won’t be political. I think it will have to be a major cultural about-face, a complete re-thinking, not of the system, but of our base-line expectations. And I think it needs to happen soon. It may be scary, it will certainly mean a complete re-thinking of how we relate to our surroundings and to each other, and it will have to be a huge.

I want to be clear: I am part of the problem. We have a lot of things. I am typing this on a plastic laptop, we have two cars, we buy things wrapped in plastic. I need to change my expectations and desires just like everyone else in this country, and I am trying to figure out how to do that.

So today, on this day when we celebrate family and country and history, I am thinking about revolutions: The ones that have been, and the ones that still need to happen. Happy 4th of July.