Suzanne Ellison knows I have a chair problem. So she destroyed my Sunday morning by passing me this link to Norimitsu Takahashi’s web site: Nori Art Handicrafts.
The builder makes lots of miniatures, which is amazing in and of itself. But many of the miniatures are chairs. Very, very nice chairs – many of which I have been studying myself.
Check out this amazing Klismos. One of the many chairs on my short list. Or, this Borge Morgensen Hunting Chair, which I am resisting all efforts to build so I can edit books. I have Morgensen’s scale drawing of the chair and enough leather. Grrr.
All of the chairs are on this page. Clicking through on each chair will show you some detail photos of the objects. Beautiful work.
This week marks four years since I left Popular Woodworking Magazine, and today the mailman delivered the August 2015 issue, which features a tool chest on the cover that I helped build.
Some think it’s peculiar that I still write for the magazine, and that the magazine still prints my stuff. I guess things always look different from the inside of a relationship.
As I’ve said many times before, editing that magazine was the best job I’ve ever had. They paid me well. They trained me. They gave me the keys to a fully equipped workshop. I worked as hard as possible to turn a struggling, third-tier craft magazine into something profitable, stable and competitive.
When I made the decision to leave, it had little to do with the magazine. It had more to do with my desires as a writer and the death of my uncle in the spring of 2011.
So if you like what we do here at Lost Art Press, you can thank Popular Woodworking in general and, specifically, former editor Steve Shanesy, who took a huge chance when he hired me in the fall of 1996.
People tell me all the time that magazines are dead. But I can think of one magazine that I’ll do anything to save until I put down my tools and my keyboard for the last time.
If ordinary applied art has a personal stamp, this means that it is incomplete. The artist has not gotten past his mistakes or arrived at the typical solution that is just as ordinary and natural in form as a Yale lock, a fountain pen, a bicycle, a scythe, a shovel. Imagine if a bicycle bore the mark of the artist who had designed it!
— Poul Henningsen (1894-1967), Danish author, architect and critic
“By making this chair five times as expensive, three times as heavy, half as comfortable, and as quarter as beautiful, an architect can very well win himself a name.”
— Poul Henningsen (1894-1967), Danish author, architect and critic, in Kritisk Revy, December 1927
Kaare Klint’s introduction to his class on draftsmanship for joiners at the Copenhagen Technical Society’s School (1920-1921 school year):
As you might know, the school is quite new; we have only had one winter’s evening classes as a basis. I must consequently tell you a bit about our results from last winter.
We began, as we will now, with surveys of old furniture, first of all to see whether pupils had a complete understanding of ordinary projection drawing and whether they were able to work precisely, and secondly, to arouse their interest in old furniture traditions and culture….
Last year we began by surveying two different groups of furniture. One comprises the forms that were created by important artists. I consider furniture in the other group (of furniture pieces) that, through the work of several people, and through evolution over a period of time, have achieved the simplest utilitarian form….
(This) other form, the one that was created over a long period of time and for ordinary use, is the one that we will be especially concerned with this year here at the school. You need not the distinctive, but the common and exceedingly utilitarian form.
From days past, we have furniture to which experience has given a form that has not been significantly changed over the ages and can be used to full advantage this very day.
The beauty of this furniture depends on its perfect, simple structure and utility. Although the pieces come from different periods, they have this in common….
We will find the best of old constructions and with recent experience seek to create furniture with the best possible craftsmanship.
— excerpt from the “Kaare Klint” monograph by Gorm Harkaer, a production of the Klintiana project.
