Since the summer months I’ve been sifting through every source I have to see if I have found a good idea for my next book, or just several thousand photos of furniture in neatly arranged folders on my laptop.
In some ways, I don’t really want to know the answer to the question.
Still, I keep amassing data from sources ranging from auction catalogs to the Early English Books Online (EEBO) data base. And after sorting through more than 10,000 images I think that things are coming into focus.
The thrust of the book is that there are several forms of furniture that haven’t changed significantly during the last 300 to 500 years. And those pieces of furniture, which show up repeatedly in the archaeological record, are the pieces of furniture that look simultaneously ancient and modern – depending on the context.
And that curious characteristic is important to people who want to make work that is divorced from style or fashion.
Today I stumbled on a great drawing that shows this idea fairly well. It’s of a trestle table – one of the 14 forms of “elemental” furniture I’ve identified. If you look at the drawing and ignore the style of the drawing – clearly early 20th century – you might just see what I see.
It’s a trestle table from the Tudor Renaissance – 1509-1603.
Or perhaps Lucy is slipping extra peyote into my coffee. Either way, it will be an interesting book.
— Christopher Schwarz
“Extra peyote”- not just the normal dose, huh? Nice.
I noticed that, too… He’s embracing the weed on one blog, and drinking cactus coffee on this one…
The joys of self-employment, or is he gearing up for the holidays?
Yeh, this is going to be a good book. Very much looking forward to it.
Chris, Any chance you know of a good book on furniture periods. I have posted this question on another forum and am just interested in the different styles. I don’t William and Mary from Federal or anything else. Let alone Shaker and Mission. Of course if you already wrote this book please feel free to call me a dufas and then point me in the right direction. Thanks John
John,
My interest is in American and English furniture (mostly). No one book does it for me. Here are a few:
“American Furniture: 1620 to the present” Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Elizabeth Bidwell Bates
“American Furniture of the 18th Century” by Jeffrey Greene
“Furniture And Its Story” The Woodworker Series
And I could go on and on. But I won’t
http://www.uncp.edu/home/rwb/classical_orders.jpg
So was I on the right track with this idea, or do I need another dose of un-taxed liquor before attempting further comment?
Jason,
You are on a right track, just not the one that is guides this book. Geo. Walker and Jim Tolpin will be investigating furniture through that lens in “Divide & Conquer” or “Good Eye” or whatever the title turns out to be.
Hmmm, probably should have done more than toos up a link.
What I was obliquely trying to say is that while it seems everyone knows what a trestle table (or blanket chest, etc) is, what really constitutes its “elemental” form is a series of pieces arranged in a specific manner guided by rough proportion to create the whole (e.g., the top is wider than the base which is wider than the column supporting the top, or some such). Anything beyond these basics is “fluff” (stretcher/no stretcher, breadboard ends vs. battens, embellished legs vs. turned legs vs. flat stock, etc.) added or removed to appeal to current fashion sensibilities.
So, I guess I was saying that elemental furniture forms, like the Greek classical orders, are composed of specific pieces that are assembled in an order and proportion that is roughly consistent across time.
Maybe.
Or is all that just too obvious and a waste of good electrons that could have been better spent brewing beer?
If I was feeling a bit friskier, I probably would have tossed in something about those proportions and sizes deriving from the human body.
If you’re going to assume that a trestle table is in some sense “fundamental,” then sure, there are certain aspects of the form that are more important than others. However, I would argue that a trestle table is not fundamental at all. I’m not aware of any that would be found in an 18th Century Japanese home, for example (there would be tables, just not trestle tables). I would go so far as to say that the only elements of a table that are truly fundamental are that it (a) has a reasonably flat horizontal top surface that allows things to be placed on it, and (b) it has some means of raising that surface above the “background,” so to speak. Everything else is “fluff” (to use your word).
Steve,
My focus has always been on Western forms because that is what I know. I don’t have the resources to venture outside those waters. So the Eastern and other forms will have to wait for someone deeply interested in them.
In the West, trestle tables are fundamental.
Chris,
I was addressing Jason’s “fluff” comment. I wasn’t trying to criticize what you’ve set out to do. What I was trying to say, albeit obliquely, is that it’s one thing to observe (and, in your case, catalog) correlations. It’s quite another to attempt to explain why those correlations exist. In the latter case, you have to be very, very careful to avoid the correlation vs. causation problem. Just like the old joke about why grandma always cut the end off of the roast (see http://www.snopes.com/weddings/newlywed/secret.asp), a lot of design features persist long after they have ceased to be useful or relevant (and, in some cases, were never particularly useful or relevant in the first place).
As for trestle tables in particular, there are certain engineering principles that allow a trestle table to work. If you’re going to build a trestle table, you need to adhere to those principles, or the table will be weak or even fall apart on its own. Those principles are what I would consider to be the fundamental functional elements of a trestle table. But I doubt that any of them are unique to the trestle table; rather, it’s the way that they are combined that leads to the “trestleness” of a table. As in mechanics, where we can decompose pretty much every mechanism into some combination of the six classical simple machines, we can do the same sort of thing with furniture.
However, when it comes to explaining the aesthetic aspects of design, I don’t think we’re yet equipped to engage in much more than wild speculation–we simply don’t understand well enough how the brain works. That said, I do believe that there is as much rational underpinning to aesthetic decomposition as there is to functional decomposition; we just don’t have much of a clue about it. In that regard, there is some recent work that you might find interesting, such as E. O. Wilson’s _Biophilia_ and related books. Nikos Salingaros has written _A Theory of Architecture_; architecture is close enough to furniture that many of the ideas are directly transferable. (My personal opinion of Salingaros is that he seems to have some useful ideas and insights, along with some ideas that seem to have come from way, way out in left field…)
[How is it that you can post a third-level nested comment, but I can only go to second-level?]
-Steve
I’d buy it.
Funny. Soon I’m going to start building a trestle bench modeled after one in a contemporary catalog. The modern catalog version was in turn inspired by a centuries old example. The design really spoke to me; never really thought about why.
Hmmm, to me the interesting thing is that furniture is not the same over time and that an expert can date pieces to time and place by their style and construction. Victor Chinnery’s “Oak Furniture, the British Tradition” would be a good example as would Cotton “the English Regional Chair” There are many more but to me the interest lies in the detail rather than the general.
Robin,
The differences in furniture through time have been the focus of most of the scholarship — from decorative details to materials to construction. There is no need for a book there in my opinion. And I do love those details myself. But what I aim to do is to show how some designs – sometimes ones were are not even aware of – have been part of our furniture culture since 500 B.C.
Fair enough I’ll look forward to seeing it. I do think it will need careful scholarship if you are to genuinely trace individual designs through 2,500 years and in which cultures? Tables for instance were extremely rare in all but the largest European households pre 1500 and chairs also. I also wonder if sometimes similar basic designs can occur through convergent evolution because they work from the raw material rather than necessarily through direct passing on of a design.
Something I think would be interesting is to look at how the same theme shows up across furniture types- for a very basic example, the generic stake-leg bench form shows up in trestle-table (sawhorse-style) legs, a shaving horse, a spinning wheel, supports for an embroidery frame, and so forth.
Mr. Schwarz, I have been reading your blog for a short while now. It is odd to me that I have not known of you until recently.I gave up reading woodworking magazines about fifteen years ago. I got tired of those damed “drill shoot outs” and the like. I went to “old school” tools relatively early on in my dismal career. I can only say that I am a fan of your way of thinking as you have laid it down here. I came about your blog by typing how to simplify in bing. from link to link I came upon this. Im glad I have. It seams to me that this should be a broader discussion on craft, and not necessarily just furniture. Not that I presume to determine the course of your blog. But I have my own agenda and that is traditional boat building. But in a way I don’t think there is that much difference ( as it concerns the thinking on execution).There are interesting ways of working wood in that world too. In any event thank you for your work and it is very much appreciated by me.
Elie Sainfeld
Elie,
I wish I were qualified to write such a blog. My specialty is small ideas. However, there are some very good blogs out there that deal with craft that you should consider adding to your RSS:
Robin Wood: http://greenwood-carving.blogspot.com/
Niels Cosman: http://materialogy.blogspot.com/
James Watriss: http://jameswatriss.blogspot.com/ (who needs to get off his duff and write more!)
I’m sure others can chime in with more.
Ye Gads!
Well, my stone has been overturned…
Kick to duff well received. 🙂
Chris, are you familiar with Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” and the subsequent “The Nature of Order” books? The former is pretty much about archetypal patterns in architecture and urbanism (“this is what makes a good courtyard”); the latter is a theory on the geometry of nature and how we can use the same processes to build harmonious things.
Something tells me that a similar approach would be very fruitful for furniture design. I’m looking forward to your investigation.
Ooh, Steve is a fan of Nikos Salingaros, too!
Salingaros is one of Christopher Alexander’s “pupils”; he has been laying down his ideas in more mathematical terms. Here are some introductory articles of his:
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20110906/the-radical-technology-of-christopher-alexander
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20111007/the-pattern-technology-of-christopher-alexander
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20111024/the-%E2%80%9Cwholeness-generating%E2%80%9D-technology-of-christopher-alexander
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20111017/the-living-technology-of-christopher-alexander
Is the idea that that the classics never die? Or maybe that human responses to functional requirements and aesthetic cues are universal to humainty through time? I guess I don’t really get what insights the demonstration of “classic forms” will lead to. Works of man are inevitably of their time, but the great works are also timeless in their quality. The great works become culture reference points and always owe a great deal to previous generations’ high water marks. Some today strive to make great works, works that will rise above style. I guess this is all to say that I kind of get the starting point of your thesis, but am unclear where you hope to go with it. Anyway, good luck.