Wine,
You will need some big petri dishes for culture enough to build a dining table…
Heh, heh.
In your theory of style imbedded in culture, how do you account for crossovers, as: the popularity and copying of Oriental wares in 18th century Europe (Chinese Chippendale), or the fad in the US for Danish modern in the 1950’s? Sometimes (often?) it is the culture shock of a new influence, not the culture itself, that affects development of style. It gets complicated.
Ray
Replies
The movie "Iron Man" may be the biggest grossing movie ever. It did 100 million in its first weekend. We're a culture of people who love TV. We spend gobs on cable and fancy tv sets. To some extent, this is our culture. Its who we are and what we do. We're TV watchers. So how about an entertainment center that is user configurable for all the different electronic gadgets and tv set sizes. It could be the beginning of a whole new style of furniture that is modular in nature. What if you could use something like a plastic milk crate as a basic structural building block, then add a face frame to it, drawers, doors. Why do we really need 30" wide drawers? We don't have puffy gowns that we need to lay flat anymore. If your module could hold my size 14 high top basketball sneaks, it could hold virtually everything I store in drawers.
good luck with your project.
Oh and Ray's right. This is a very complicated subject and it very quickly will lead to something that has nothing to do with woodworking. You'll probably get better answers elsewhere.
Adam
Adam,
It is only the very fossilized, like you, (and me, and some of our customers), who would even think of hiding or surrounding the new cultural icon (wide screen tv) in an artifact of the old (cabinet, entertainment center), modular or not. I've noticed that the generation that has grown up in the computer age, has no need to conceal it, or pretend it is furniture. They hang the dam things right on the wall, out there for god and everyone to see.
Remember when television sets came in real wood cabinets, with cute little turned legs with brass cups on their tips, or Mediterranean style carvings? Like real furniture.
Ray
"Remember when television sets came in real wood cabinets, with cute little turned legs with brass cups on their tips, or Mediterranean style carvings? Like real furniture."Ray, I had a great-uncle who was an old-time cabinetmaker. In 1955, towards the end of his life, he worked for RCA Victor making those first TV cabinets. I was only 6 years old at the time but I remember him complaining to my Dad how degrading it was for him to have to make those "mongrel bastard boxes" instead of real furniture. Just thought I'd put your term "fossilized" into some perspective...regards,David Ring
http://www.touchwood.co.il/?id=1&lang=e
Ray,
Perhaps the biggest influence for the wife and we when decidied on a cabinet to house all our high-tech AV gear was that it look like a piece of furniture. We also did NOT want some gomping piece that took over the whole room, often referred to as the focal point.
The flat panel display will be mounted on the wall with an appropriate real wood picture frame. Now if I could make some wooden linen-fold curtains, then God would only see it when it's on.
Another fossil not a couch potatoe,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Wine,
And it is hard to get your head out of one's own cultural bias, and into another's. The Victorians tried it when they built all that reproduction "Centennial"style furniture in 1876. Much of it is pretty readily discernable because it looks like it was designed by someone who was used to making and carving Victorian style stuff. Just like the "Chinoiserie" things that were made in England, by putting black paint with gold leaf fishermen catching carp, on the surface of Georgian pieces, so they'd look "lacquered" .
I've recently been going thru the same experience with a client who is wanting stuff in the Art Nouveau style. Those curves and proportions are a challenge for someone who has been looking at and drawing Queen Anne and Chippendale curves and carvings all his career. Makes one's brain sore.
Ray
Oh yes, in 17th century China there was a whole industry that produced furniture (and other stuff) specifically for the European market. Craig Clunas called this a revolution in perception, affecting all fields of art and design. Chinese hongmu Art Deco-style furniture seems to be super-hot in collectors circles these days.
It worked both ways (at least to some extend): Laowai style furniture, left some mark on Chinese culture; of course it is well established that the Chinese imported the habit of sitting on chairs (as opposed to sitting on the floor) from the West; this fact would possibly be one data point to support your hypothesis.
The Honolulu Academy of Arts features two exquisite exhibits called "East Meets West: The Asia Trade" and "East Meets West: The Western Response". So next time you are in Hawaii, forget about the beach and head to the museum...
---
Chris Scholz
Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
Galoot-Tools
I think the word style is overworked. In keeping with that notion I will not doubt overwork my explanation for that remark.
When I think of style I think of Queen Anne, Chippendale, Federal, Arts & Crafts, etc. When I see the term Art-Deco is that really a style in this context? For example, is Mission Style really a style or a subset of Arts & Crafts?
I'm so confused by all these words,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Bob,
It's important, I think, to remember that the succession of styles is not marked by the complete cessation of one with the beginning of the next. I was just thinking of the way that a new stylistic feature is often first expressed by just being pasted onto the familiar form of the preceding style. A Chippendale mirror with inlaid Eagle instead of a carved, gilded phoenix, for example. Or the substitution of French feet for ogee brackets on a case piece. I copied an old chair that had turned William and Mary style front legs and stretcher, Queen Anne vase shaped splat, and a Chippendale crest rail. With the passage of time, the newest styles were added on, where they were most visible, the older features retained where they didn't show.
Our friend Lataxe is probably the one to speak to the variations and niceties of the transitions and subsets of the Art nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Mission, and Art Deco styles. Most of the Art nouveau gurus were I believe French, but their design statements had both positive and negative (emulation and reactionary) effects on the British proponents of the Arts and Crafts style, and the American Mission offshoot of the A&C movement.
Lataxe, how'd I do with that?
Ray
Ray,
Ahh so, morphing has been around a lot longer than I thought. That clears up a lot of air for me.
Thanks,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Southern Style = Build it so your wife doesn't't b*tch about it from the day she see's it until eternity. Anything she won't see.. just sit it on concrete blocks and go cut the grass with a mint julep or three between rows.. after alternating direction of which way do I go with the mower to make it appear this is a new, creative, adventurous and exciting style! he......
Regards...
Sarge..
Sarge,
A buddy of mine says the only difference between one woman and another, is the way they wear their hair. Kinda like you mowing the yard in another direction, and calling it a change...haha
Ray
But Ray,
It's the latest rage in lawncare. Make your lawn look like the putting green @ Augusta! Ya can geet special rollers attached to the back so they flatten the grass down and yo lawn looks like a checkerboard.
Me, I jes let the hosses keep the grass down.
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Southern Style on that new rage is dig it up.. concrete the d*amn thing and paint it green. Saves maintenance which translates to more shop and fishin' time. :>)
Sarge..
Sarge,
Had a house in my neighborhood where all the kids congregated.
Owner finally gave up on his lawn, and had it concreted over and painted green.
We kids called the house - "the green cement".
Had it done just in time for the first coming of skateboards - early 60's (when a pebble would stop the darn thing)
It is still there, in Hamtramck, Michigan - an inburb of Detroit (Detroit grew up and around it)
Still take people past there when I do my "roots tour" thing.
Mike
Where I got the idea was from a gentleman from up north (Illinois I think) that moved down and joined our bass club back in the early 80's. Fred was an unusual character and wore a baseball cap with a bill that was at least 9" long that stuck out in front of his nose. He owned a Yamaha and Hammond piano company.. but he was un-orthodox to say the least.
I suppose he got hooked on fishing and figured the lawn was taking too much of his fishing time. While his wife was out of town visiting relative still up north... he had it concreted and painted green. She got home and wasn't a very happy camper.
The divorce papers were filed about a week latter. But Fred said OK as both cases gave him more time to fish. The first time he went bass fishing with us.. a bass struck his lure and was caught. I suppose it is a courtesy up north when you have a fish on the line to yell out. "Fish On" so everyone will reel in line to avoid getting tangled when the fish runs.
Ole Fred yelled out "Fish On" but that is a mistake with southern boys. That told us he had one and there might be a running mate. About 20 lbs. of lead sinkers hit the water where is line went under water attached to the fish.
That was the last time he ever yelled... Fish On.. ha.. ha... ha..ha..ha..
Regards...
Sarge..
Chris,
And to add yet another bounce to this ping-ponging of style, there is a trade in reproductions of the ornate rococo Chippendale furniture that comes from the far east. So you have Chinese-made copies of English antiques showing eastern influence. The Eastern interpretation of English rococo has a definite "accent"-- the carvings flow differently, lines of the legs, and crest rails often look exaggerated, if not arthritic.
Ray
Winemane...........interesting......., bamboo is the next hot material coming down the pike, and many of the designs using the material seem to always reflect the Tori gate in some form. That would seem to fall into your approach to your design process. As I was reading your post, when you would write "cultural style", I was thinking of designing to a woodworking technique.
My video blog.........Carlo Mollino Ep 06 Parts 1 and 2
http://furnitology.blogspot.com/index.html]
Guess mebbe I did a knee jerker there. I sometimes get confused with the term style. Keep trying to relate it to nomenclature and perhaps that's my mistake.
Maybe we in Knots should set a standard for the term and quit this morphing about!?
Gads now I probly stirred up a hornets nest,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Haven’t seen any hornets yet :>
Oh man, I just saw a bunch of 'em heading toward Missouri!
I'm still fumbling with what to say about your scenario in your previous post above. Most interesting challenge to make a piece with a minimum of influences. Will ye be allowin for materials at hand?
Makes ya think about form/function, eh. And a whole lot more. Wait a minute - I get it!
Show me, right?
Regards,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Wineman..... you've really touched on some very good points through this post, evidenced by your statement:
I believe we set too many restrictions on ourselves when it comes to creativity for fear of having to explain ourselves ......I'll add that what is worse is a builder talking in defense of his/her design, if you've worked your design elements, just let the chips fly.
You said: I don’t think I’m getting my point across. I understand where you are trying to go. It would be great to wipe the creative slate clean. Wegner designed his Chinese chair based off an existing design within its culture and still today is a best selling chair in the asian markets. You've really touched on an approach that brings forward the social history of furniture manufacturing and where it fits in your thinking. Somebody mentioned Art Nouveau above which has extensive play in numerous "cultures" but is it more social or cultural. And what would you do, if the culture you selected was a historical conglomeration should as Turkey. The palet would be wide open for interpretation.
Just to add a thought, when Micheal Thonet came up with his bent laminated chairs, that was new, but was it a cultural design representing Austria or an experiment in machining?
You've presented a complicated and quite interesting thought.........Neil
My video blog.........Carlo Mollino Ep 06 Parts 1 and 2
http://furnitology.blogspot.com/index.html]
Edited 5/14/2008 9:47 pm ET by a Furnitologist
I believe we set too many restrictions on ourselves when it comes to creativity for fear of having to explain ourselves ......I for one LOVE your pages.. GREAT STUFF and then some!
Your helper is beautiful as any wife should be!
I have the luxury I can be creative for just my family these days.. They seem to love it! I do not have to sell it!
I don't think you need to apologize for the depth. You have opened a door and now other's are stepping through.
I have to ask you a question. Have you ever lived in a foreign culture? This isn't meant to be disrespectful. I'm curious. And yes, I have. Paris and Tokyo.
I don't think you can separate cultural influences. For example. Do you like Tempura? Did you know that it is originally a Portuguese dish? Even if you observe a culture, you may not know if a particular quirk comes from that culture.
Len
"You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time. " J. S. Knox
Wineman, in my business, you can't lead a hor to culture..but you can't make her think. Old landscape humour. Sorry.
I think if you were to look at Fine Woodworking annual design book the 1st and 2nd editions, you would see some great woodworking. The problem is the design was dated for the age, 1980's. Is this culture, style or is this period? Today it looks dated. The look is curvy, organic, cool sort of hippy style. I can scan a few and post them if you like. The look is from a time frame and was "in" for the time. Be careful about what is culture and what is fad of the culture.
I concur completely, design for function first. What does the piece accomplish? Next is how to present the piece. So if you borrow some from here or there it is OK. How do you bring this to a sense of space that says YES, I really nailed this? That is the essence of great design. The chair in one of the last issues that is on the back page was so elegant, so sleek, so inviting. I want to sit in that chair... I need that Chair.... I have to have that chair. It is modern but just speaks of how comfortable it is to be in. Irresistible to my EYE, but maybe not yours, but probably a lot of others.
My feeling is push the envelope and pursue something that feels right. The first go around may not be quite it, so do another. Ever wonder why artists do exhibits with versions of the same idea, they just have not committed.
There is no linear path that leads to good design, it is a process that you explore. Judging by your comments you understand that and have already decided on your design thought. Now it is only a matter of commitment to your design.
Thanks for the topic and thoughts. AZMO
-----------_o
---------_'-,>
-------(*)/ (*) http://www.EarthArtLandscape.com
W,
This is a very interesting thread. I am no designer but after reading the many interesting posts feel moved to make an offering, which is a rather inchoate mental ramble rather than a theory or concise idea. :-)
On my bookshelves there reside many tomes containg fine photos of the work by a large number of modern designer-makers, mostly American and British. These cover the last decade or three. Despite trying very hard to put aside my usual tastes, predjudices, likings and so forth, I still find it difficult to fully admire or want to emulate the vast majority of the pieces pictured.
The underlying difficulty I seem to have with all these contemporary pieces is that they are over-consciously "designed". The maker has striven to be innovative, eye-catching, amusing, controversial or just palin "individual". The motifs used are often gathered not just from a world-wide gallery of cultures but also from a wide gallery of not-furniture objects. The gathering seems often to be random or down to happenstance. ("I was travelling in Ubekistan and saw this donkey saddle......").
The result is often more sculpture than furniture. The pieces often pay only lip-service to function; and eschew traditional forms as though they were a mental plague.
In short, despite trying to adopt a modern mindset in order to appreciate these modern pieces, I cannot escape the desire to find the same features in them as I find in those traditional forms that have lasted and remained popular outside of current fads and fashions. When those forms (with utility, human ergonomics, classical proportion et al) are absent then I struggle to be impressed by the remaining sculpti-furniture.
Nevertheless furniture styles and forms do evolve, somehow. I am guessing but I suspect the most succesful evolutions are so in the strict sense of that word - they are a variation on a previous form that has mutated a bit and proved successful. A radical new form, conjured from a vibrant modern imagination usually fails and becomes merely a ludicrous fashion of a past time. (But perhaps not always).
Greene & Greene represent a model of the the most radical yet evolutionary approach in furniture design. They took the traditional forms of two very different cultures and succesfully mated them. The key word is "traditional" - they took two successful "breeds" and got a new hybrid that had the strengths of both parents. And they considered the furniture, not every other object, of that foreign culture.
So perhaps your approach of taking from other cultures, after the due consideration of form following function, is likely to be the most successful - even if the mating sometimes results in a still-borm entity or a creature with one too many legs? In any event, one feels that approach is far more likely to result in a lasting new style (a tradition) than is the Rationalist attempt to design from the ground up, with little reference to the lessons of tradition and the use of motifs selected at random for impressing the eye rather than the arm. back or posterior.
For random and spurious redesign of an existing near-perfect design, I often think of the article in FWW concerning the six design students requested to mess with the Adirondack chair design. The results were.... sculpti-rondack - not objects to sit in but rather to look at and go "Coo, how innovative".
Lataxe, rambling on and on.
Ok, here is where I get mixed up, and I'll try to keep it really simple.
Style vs Design. I don't see where they are interchangeable. I see style as a result of design.
Regards,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Bob,
Excuse me for jumping in here, but, I see design as "a four-drawered box", style is the ornamentation applied to it.
FWW recently did an article on shelf units, where the basic shelves (the design) were done in several different looks (styles).
I would extend this to the layout as well. You can find golden sections and fibonacci series and triangular themes throughout the various styles and periods of furniture.
A chair needs to serve some basic requirements, height off floor, depth of seat, angles, and joint strength - all functional chairs meet these design criteria. Styles are all over the map.
Just my thoughts,
Mike
Hi Mike,
I see Queen Anne as a style. Within the QA style I see a cabriole leg as a design element or part used in that style. Golden sections, fibonacci series, triangular themes and cyma curves are the rules/guidelines used to construct the various design elements/parts of a style.
A form to me is a piece within a style, i.e. a chair, a desk, a chest of a particular style. For example, I do not think of a Maloof chair as a style but rather a Maloof (inspired) design, same for a Nakashima piece.
This probably makes sense only to me...............
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
I get what you are doing, but I'm not sure why you think this is or will be fun. I do this everyday all day. I try to design for a culture that died 250 years ago and sell to a culture that is unlike the old one or my own. Its kind of a drag really.
And I think you need to expand your thinking beyond ornament. For many members of the anglo american 18th c world, symmetry was a new thing. Their parents and grand parents lived without symmetry. And when they sat for dinner (at 2 pm or whatever) every spoon and bowl was different like the three bears. Its really amazing how pervasive symmetry and order are in our culture.
This has nothing to do with furniture but it might give you a sense for just how different other cultures can be from ours. I was talking to a man who studies Algonquin languages. In many European languages articles (the) are engendered (male or female). In Algonquin languages, this man said articles were alive or dead. I'm not sure Native Americans had place names. I'm not sure they had names for their tribes. The name for many native american tribes is "man" or "men".
Anyway, if this is a subject that interests you, you may find the cutting edge of this sort of effort is coming from reproduction furniture makers. We recently had this discussion in another thread. It seemed from the outside to be about something else, but this was the real subtext. The editor of FWW's Best of Making Period Furniture talked about this through the first dozen articles or so. I think its a must read.
Adam
Adam,
Gotta disagree with you on the symmetry thing. Bi-lateral symmetry is fairly common in the natural world. At least on the show surface! Any of our ancestors who looked at a fellow human (except Quasimodo), dog, cow, chicken, was living with symmetry. So that, it seems to me, the desire to create objects of symmetry might be a desire to emulate the workings of a higher power, and goes back further than you suppose. Even those spoons and bowls, were typically symmetrical, in that the left side resembled the right, no?
But, your point on the difficulty of getting your head around other cultures is spot-on, I believe. While it may be relatively easy to see an object as used in an alien culture, and identify it, it seems to me that without some sort of insight into what that object means, or represents, in its cultural context, it is simply a gew-gaw, and not the icon that it may be.
Unrelated to furniture design, but the flap about candidate Obama's representation of middle America's attachment to guns and religion as a reaction to bitterness about how the gov't has not helped them, is an example of what I'm talking about. His cultural prism prevented him from seeing that the importance of guns and religion might mean just the opposite to what he thought, in a culture that prizes independence, and self sufficiency. If you believe that art can convey emotion thru its representations, might not the image of the same object ( gun ) convey two different messages to these two audiences? Have you seen the rugs coming out of the middle east that have images of helicopters and AK's woven onto them?
Ray
Ray,Have you read "In Small Things Forgotten" by James Deetz? If you haven't read it please buy a copy and give to George when you've finished it. Deetz is the archeologist who used found objects and written documents to try to reassemble the attitudes of the Plymouth colony. He was in charge of Pilmoth Plantation for many years. He describes in this book how Anglo americans experienced an attitudinal shift almost like a English Renaissance between 1650 and 1750. Its a great book, but you have to stick with it. I had to read it twice to really understand what he was talking about. Another great easy read is "Everyday Life in Early America" by David Freeman Hawk. I'm pretty sure he has photos of the houses that used branches for timbers or where every window is a different size and different height off the floor. Deetz argues that this wasn't a mistake. Perhaps like the good Senator, they just didn't think like we do. Adam
Adam,
I'll look for those books.
Thanks,
Ray
Ray,
I like stories about both past and present cultures as they are entertaining and eventually one may somehow integrate the many and often contradictory stories into some form of understanding that might provide enough insight to allow one to achieve some form of identification with, or projection into, that culture. But without immersion in it, one can be only an observer making guesses and listening to tales.
Of course for the purposes of arts and crafts, it doesn't really matter if we don't understand the "true" symbology of some old or external culture we have glimpsed. Those cutures, with their various symbols, emblems, motifs, styles and so forth, can still be a handy bin of design-stuff for any furniture maker to dip into. What does it matter if one has missed the cultural significance of a bit of frou-frou or curvature when including them in one's own design? It only matters to those who wish to create reproductions, copies or fakes. Even then, the purported meanings of the various squiggly bits adorning the fake may be just someone's story about "what it signified to a man of 1771".
Such re-employment of design elements without any real understanding of their original source or meaning is commonplace, especially these days in the information-rich global village. Meanings and significances of symbols change on a daily basis. Gawd, even the language evolves like a fruit fly on steroids!
****
Thank you for that fine guffaw, incidentally - adherence to religion as a cultural manifestation of independence and self-sufficiency. Haw haw - surely religion is a mind cage invented to ensure we do not think for ourselves and will always need both the earthly institutions and the Big Sky Daddy to look after us and tell us how to think and live, in each and every particular? Another variety of totalitarianism, inclusive of mad ideals, false threats & promises and an Ultimate Distaste for those who are "Not Us" (for which policy them guns you mention have proved very handy).
Lataxe, who sees the human world as stage, full of reusable props.
Edited 5/17/2008 3:32 am ET by Lataxe
I say the iconographic motifs of early furniture are like a language. I can repeat what's been said, or reassemble the words and phrases to say something new. But if one doesn't know what the words mean, one is left with a Tower of Babel highboy. Some may nod their heads approvingly, pretending to understand. Or you might get lucky and actually spell a word or two correctly. I guess it comes down to who you build for. I build primarily for myself and I speak the language. I don't like misspellings or mispronunciations in my furniture.Adam
Lataxe old bean,
There you are! I'd been looking for you.
Yes, it is true that one can tack, append or suspend any manner of decorations onto whatever he wishes. I have two or three books from Dover press, full of those bits. "Hand book of ornament" one of them is called, "Styles of Ornament" I believe the other is. But, I've been somewhat reluctant to draw from them wholesale as you seem to be suggesting, for while they are chock-a-block with gew-gaws, they are mighty slim on context. Showing a lotus-blossom, the caption might say "from an Egyptian vessal" Hmm, was it a flowerpot, or a chamberpot?
Can you see that putting a carving of Milton's or Shakespeare's likeness might be more appropriate on the pediment of a desk and bookcase, than on a spitoon? If you'd never heard of the gents, it wouldn't make much difference, as long as the image filled the space sufficiently well. Hmm.... here's a Greek picture of an old fellow looking solicitously down at his companion lying on a couch. Would YOU sleep well in a bed carved with a representation of Procrustes on its headboard? (Keep your feet pulled well up! But not too far up.)
"adherence to religion as a cultural manifestation of independence "
"Independance from a need for governmental intrusion", would have been clearer for those who are religio-culturally deprived (youse, e.g.). The whole "if God is with us, who can be against us" thing was what I was referencing. It was not my intent to debate the efficacy of such a viewpoint, but just to set it apart from the idea that "we are from the gov't, and we're here to save you." Exchanging one crutch for another, indeed, but your missing my point, rather neatly made it for me, yes?
Been looking at "the toad" and I have some ideas, will elaborate in a post off-line.
Cheers,
Ray
Ray,
Now that I have been crutched a bit by Mr Atlee's government of the mid C20th (innoculations to stop me dying as a baby; free rosehip syrup, malt, orange juice and milk to make me big, strong and ricket-free; a free education all the way to university; etc.) I am all for making the hoi-polloi pay for everything so I can have 0.05p off the income tax. After all, I am alright now.
Politicians - can't abide them, unless the barbarians are at the door. (Hang on, I see a horde at the end of the street just now)!
Of course, I draw the line at letting the buggers tell me what to think. :-)
I'm looking forward to discussion of toad matters, including any suggestions garnered from your books of "applique motifs for idea-bereft toad-makers".
Lataxe
PS I never miss the slightest opportunity to goad the religious, in the hope that they will give up their current lobbying to make blasphemy a crime (again). Of course, as I may have mentioned before, I am a grateful recipient of many elements from the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly the Protestant mindset of anti-authoritarianism. :-) Also, I think Islam did well to give us all that Greek stuff, not to mention the mathematics. And I just love all those Arabic star-names begining with "Al".
L,
Huh, I thought it was the Greeks that gave us all that Greek stuff.
Ray
Ray,
Through the dark ages of Europe the great works of the ancient world were lost to us. There was but mad myth and religious nonsense of the most looney ilk, writ in lovely illuminated manusripts available only to a few. Many were the tales of dogmen, divine visitations and the stories of how Brutus sailed to England to found the Royal Dynasty that included King Arthur.
Meanwhile the Arab (Moorish) world had them Greek manuscripts secreted about their librams and eventually they made their way to Europe, where they were translated and began to grow what we now call The Modern World in the minds of Western radicals of the time. There was that Francis Bacon, Erasmus and a great sea of other lads greedily gulping down the Greeks and popping out New Ideas like a hen on amphetamines.
So, yes, the Greeks gave us that base philosophy, math, geometry et al that we built on; but it was Islam that valued and preserved it all for us to "find". 'Twas they that were civilised then, as we Ypeans argued about the angels and the pin and other "essential" ecclesiastical matters when there was a lull from burning heretics or torturing witches.
Of course, just now the Islamists have taken to another mindset altogether. Ah well, it will be the midwest Xztians turn to try for a burn of the world soon. Mind diseases are quick to mutate and cross the borders.
Lataxe, who wishes Plato had been lost in a drawer somewhere.
When I set out to design a piece of furniture I will start with function which is followed by form.
And then there is what the user wants!
I know every time I come home with new tool I have a difficult time explaining to my wife why I needed it. So I blame the English language???
I would bring all sorts of tools and stuff.. All my wife ever asked is.. "any money left to feed the children"
"As you said you build furniture from a culture over 250 years old and when you are building something don’t you project yourself back to this time?"
I do. And maybe to a greater degree than most. But as I pull on my stockings and high heeled shoes in the morning, I must say that I feel profoundly the difference between them and myself. And I see my cultural proclivities creeping into my work.
I think I'm following you. Or at least I'm trying to and to relate what you're talking about to my life.
"But could you redefine this furniture style if given the opportunity?"
I guess I do by accident. I really buy into what you've said, i.e. that style and culture and design are linked. So I'm not sure it can be helped. I think to really make a substantive change to the furniture style, I would need to adopt a new culture. Otherwise, yes, I think I could do what Ray was talking about. I could do what has been done and pull Roman, Dutch, English designs together and add my high tech middle american culture and make a really great storage unit for tee shirts, sneakers, computers or tvs! :)
Adam
Adam,
Even if you could adopt a new culture I think it would be nearly impossible to neglect/ignore the influences of your experience.
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Right Bob. And I don't think I could adopt a new culture.But we can't ignore ignore the use of cultural themes (for lack of a better word) to create something new. I think George Nakashima did a pretty good job of taking a set of cultural ideals or ideas and applying them to create a new-ish furniture style. Japanese furniture at that point in time was not particularly naturalistic or free-form. But he took what he knew or felt about his cultural and allowed his furniture to represent it. What I loved about it was that he was selling the culture as much or more than the furniture. I recall visiting his studio as a young man, removing my shoes as I entered and seeing the workmen in their indigo kimonos. And they were working Pennsylvania Black Walnut, which I don't immediately associate with Japanese culture per se. A nice juxtaposition and the sort of thing I have sought in my own work.Adam
Adam,
Your mention of Nakashima is most interesting to me as his name came to mind when I first saw this discussion. I wondered if his new culture (ours) had any influence on his designs. Reading The Soul of a Tree gave me some insight into his life.
I can almost draw some parallels between Nakashima and Dr. An Wang (Wang Labs.) for it was there I cut my teeth on computers. He too was oriental and adopted a new culture (ours). In more than one instance glaring differences were apparent between his cultural influences and those of our own in the conduct of the business and was reflected in his book, Lessons.
Granted I am talking of completely different mediums but there are distinct similarities in the mindset of the individuals. And under very similar circumstances as well. Dr. Wang had $51 in his pocket when he emigrated to the U.S.
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
I designed by culture and I picked out several river rocks with a shallow scoop that fit out butts!
why reinvent the wheel?...build what people will buy. That said you need a plant in China and about 4000 acres of rubber trees. Oh yea......and a Walmart rep in your wallet.
Wicked Decent Woodworks
(oldest woodworking shop in NH)
Rochester NH
" If the women dont find you handsome, they should at least find you handy........yessa!"
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