Fig. 2.4.1. The classic orders dominated pre-20th-century furniture-design books. Above is shown a Corinthian capital.
This is an excerpt from “By Hand and Eye” by Geo. R. Walker and Jim Tolpin.
The lifeblood of craft has always depended on knowledge passing from one generation to the next, and I struggle finding words to convey the importance that classic orders played. This is an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of thousands of artisans gone before you, a chance to learn things that cannot be put into words, because this leads into a room in your imagination. The classic orders aren’t about memorizing some nifty proportional recipes. In fact, it’s the furthest thing from recipes. It’s about learning to see. The physical act of drawing challenges the mind to reshuffle and see things anew. Try not to approach this like you’re learning a task or skill; instead just immerse yourself in this rite of passage. Have some fun with it, and let the ancients knock down the cobwebs and pry open some windows in some long-forgotten play space in your imagination.
Fig. 2.4.2. You’ll need a sharp pencil, an eraser, several dividers, a straightedge and a couple fine-point markers to make your pencil lines permanent at the final step.
Grab a clean pine board about 8″ wide and 3′ long for a canvas. If (when) you botch the first attempt, simply plane or sand to reveal a new surface for another go. Pencil in all your lines then, after the entire drawing is complete, go back over your pencil lines with a marker. Think of it like a maze or a puzzle that will change the way you think and make new connections in your imagination. I encourage you, as always, to do this with pencil and not a computer to make sure you get the most direct connection between the portal of your hand and inner eye.
A word about scale. Because you will be drawing a relatively small image, some of the details will be too awkward to draw with a compass. For elements such as moulding profiles or the finer points on the capital, draw a separate detail sketch in larger format with a compass. Once you have completed the larger sketch, go back and hand sketch those details in. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well you can freehand sketch once you have the boundary of the form established and little practice on the larger detail drawings. This has real value in furniture design, also. For example, a volute is a delightful form to work into a design, yet because of scale, almost always requires drawing freehand. Generating a volute with a compass will inform your freehand attempts. Also because of scale, don’t attempt to use geometry to draw the entasis (slight convex bulging) on the upper two thirds of the column, just draw a straight taper.
In this drawing exercise you will render a Roman Doric order based on James Gibbs’ “Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture” (circa 1732). There are five orders – Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite – that exist in an almost endless number of versions and varieties to draw and explore.
Fig. 2.4.3. The moulding at the top of this base is a proportional extension of the base below it. The half-circle indicates that it’sone-third of the base’s height. The quarter-arc shows the linkage between the height of the moulding and the projection of the base.
A few points about communicating proportions using arcs. One common way to show how a proportion relates to another element is to use a half-circle or quarter-circle to indicate a connection. Typically, a half-circle extends a mirror image proportion along the same line. Conversely, a quarter-circle mirrors a proportion from one element to an adjacent element but from horizontal to vertical (or vice versa).
Start by organizing the form (Doric order) into its major vertical parts: the beginning, middle and ending, better known as pedestal, column and entablature. Draw a vertical centerline and establish the top and bottom of your drawing with a pair of horizontal lines, leaving yourself a few inches of margin above and below. Use dividers to step off these major elements and indicate their boundaries with horizontal lines. Once you establish the height of the middle (column) you can determine the module. In the case of the Doric, divide the column height into eight equal parts. That’s the diameter of the shaft near the base and also, therefore, your module. Now – and this is important – draw a small module key in the space below your drawing. Many of the elements that follow will be simple divisions of the module, for example, the column-base height is a one-half module, so having this key handy will speed up the drawing process. To create a key, draw a horizontal line and mark off two modules end-to-end using vertical hash marks to highlight them. Then use your dividers and, through trial and error, step off one module into halves, quarters and eighths. Then step off the second module into thirds, sixths and 12ths.
Fig. 2.4.4. On this Doric order the diameter of the column at the base is the module. That is, one eigth the overall height of the column. Once you find the module, step off a key with simple divisions of the module. You can then use the key to quickly reset your dividers as the drawing progresses.
Start with the largest divisions and work down to the smaller details. Once you have established the overall column height and diameter of the shaft at the base, there are a couple reference lines to pencil in. Note that the column height is divided into thirds and that the lower third’s shaft diameter remains constant while the upper two-thirds curve in gradually – an effect the Greeks called entasis. (As I mentioned earlier, however, at this scale you may want to just render the entasis as a slight taper rather than as a curve.) Also note the use of reference lines: One extends the outside diameter of the shaft above the column while a second extends the outside of the column base below into the pedestal. These lines allow you to step off the horizontal projection of elements in the pedestal and entablature.
Once you’ve established the overall vertical organization, draw in the details of the pedestal. Start by stepping off the vertical organization and then establish the horizontal projection for each part. Most are a function of the module or pulled from an adjacent proportion. Move up to the column and then the entablature.
For certain, you will take a wrong turn or two and have to backtrack and rethink it. It’s all part of learning to see proportionally. When your drawing is completed, you’ll not only have some studies to hang on the shop wall, but you’ll also have created an important mile marker on your journey to becoming an artisan designer.
In early March 2017, Jim Tolpin woke up in the middle of the night with a revelation: He finally understood where trigonometry comes from. “I was actually just working on that when you called,” he says. “And I actually think I just figured it out.”
He approached it the way an artisan would, hands-on, intuitive. “It hurts my head to keep doing this,” he says. “Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up in the middle of the night thinking about math? I literally got up early and just started taking notes, looking up Latin and root words.”
Jim is, above all else, a teacher. But he’s the best kind of teacher. The kind who never believes he knows it all, the kind who never stops learning. In some ways, he can’t help it. It’s in his blood.
Jim grew up on the East coast, specifically Springfield, Mass., with his parents and his sister. His family is East European and came over several generations before. Most of them were in the sciences, but his highly educated grandfather was a craftsperson, who found work in America as a grocer and cabinetmaker.
As a young boy Jim spent the weekends with his grandfather, tagging along to lumberyards, helping him pick out material and working on small projects with him at home. “He definitely was a very early inspiration to the pleasures of making something with your hands and seeing it come to life,” Jim says. “I attribute that to him.”
Jim’s parents were not craftspeople. “My dad was basically a bean counter and a court reporter, and my mom was an at-home mom,” he says. “I related quite a bit more to my grandparents than I did to my own parents.”
Most everyone else in Jim’s family? Teachers.
In high school Jim fell in love with studying the sciences. “I had some super-nerd friends and we got together and built ham radios and went up to the mountains with our radios and set up antennas and did all that kind of fun stuff,” he says.
Jim attended University of Massachusetts Amherst, first majoring in physics and then switching to geology with a minor in journalism. He enjoyed field work, especially mapping, and working with his hands.
“At this point I really enjoyed learning about science and understanding the basic concepts of it, and I wanted to do what Carl Sagan ended up doing, which was bringing science to the public and being able to explain it to the public,” he says. One of Jim’s favorite professors taught both geology and journalism. Jim’s future career, science writing, seemed obvious. He was accepted into Stanford to pursue a doctorate. in just that. But then came the Vietnam War. Jim got a deferment and entered the Teachers Corps in Worcester, Mass., for one year.
After the Teachers Corps, Jim got a job teaching geology at the University of New Hampshire in 1970. There he met some students who had studied under Tage Frid at the Rhode Island School of Design. They were taking on various cabinetmaking and installation jobs, and Jim devoted himself to them, helping them and learning from them. “Within just a year or so I think I learned more about woodworking than I did about geology in four years of college,” he says. “Because of that total immersion, that total engagement.” At this point, “science writer” began to fade. “I had an inherent compulsion to want to work with my hands,” he said.
Enter Bud McIntosh, an old-school boat builder. Bud turned out to be a huge influence on Jim, convincing him that he wouldn’t be throwing away his education by going into woodworking. “He also had a degree in classic literature, actually, but he devoted his whole life to boat building, and found it a challenge from start to finish.”
Something clicked. Jim realized there could be challenge, joy and the chance to always learn new things in the field of woodworking. “My mind and my hands would be fully engaged,” he says.
Jim Tolpin timberframing in the early 1970s. Photo by Ken Kellman.
Jim continued cabinetmaking and then got a job with another boat builder in Rockport, Maine, fitting out interiors of workboat-type yachts. It was a crash course in complicated woodworking (think slopes and curves) that improved his work.
In 1978 Jim moved out to the West coast, Washington state, specifically, with his young family for opportunities in boatbuilding. He heard the pay was better — and it was. He found work right away doing interior finishes on boats, but soon transitioned to cabinetmaking for a couple reasons: he could make even more money and he realized he was a more efficient cabinetmaker than he was a boatbuilder.
Jim building a tinker’s wagon in the early 1980s.Jim with his son and traveling model cabinet in the early 1990s. Photo by Pat Cudahy.
Jim learned how to make a (good) living out of a small cabinetmaking shop. He experimented with setups, and figured out the best way to design his workflow. And from that came his first book: “Jim Tolpin’s Guide to Becoming a Professional Cabinetmaker.”
So he wasn’t his own version of Carl Sagan. And he wasn’t teaching anyone about science. But he was teaching woodworking. And so, his college dream began to come true in another way. (Spoiler alert: He’s now written more than a dozen books and has sold more than three-quarters of a million copies.)
Jim’s cabinet shop in the early 1990s. Photo by Pat Cudahy.
During these years Jim says he thoroughly enjoyed cabinetmaking, and not just the making. He enjoyed figuring out, and writing about, how to run a successful cabinet shop. “Really the goal, in cabinetry, is to design a system where you can hire some kid off the street and in one or two days you can teach him the entire process,” he says. “When I realized that I was that kid off the street, it wasn’t challenging anymore.”
So he explored new avenues of woodworking. This included green woodworking, and building pitchforks and chairs with his friend, Dave Sawyer. “And then I got into this whole notion of building small boats,” he says. “I did a couple small boats and then I got into gypsy wagons.”
Yes. Gypsy wagons.
“That was a real challenge,” Jim says. “I didn’t have plans for building gypsy wagons. I did have some museum drawings but they didn’t show joinery. And I needed to do joinery for something that could travel on the highway. So I kind of did a lot of seat-of-the-pants engineering to build these things.” He built six.
It was during these years that Jim became a prolific writer. “I’m writing stuff down as I’m learning it,” he says. “So after I learned something and felt like I really had a handle on it I’d write a book about it. There’s a whole series of books that happened one after another and I slowly migrated from making a living woodworking to making a living writing about woodworking. I was really getting into a balance of journalism and doing the craft itself.”
And Jim loved that balance. He was living out Bud’s wisdom, engaging both his hands and his mind while also doing what he loved — woodworking along with constant learning.
“Most afternoons and evenings I’d be in the shop making stuff, testing things out, testing out some theories about the process,” he says. His mornings, when he says he was “freshest and not antsy,” were devoted to writing. “I was constantly discovering a different way of looking at all these processes and trying to really understand what’s really happening when we use a tool on wood in a certain way. What’s really going on from a physics point of view? And I’d do some analysis about that and experiment with that. I’m not a fast learner, by any means. I had to really experience it. I find that I have to work from my hands to understand something.”
With his books, Jim became a household name among woodworkers. With this fame came the reputation that he was, as he says, an absolutely fantastic woodworker. “I’m an OK woodworker,” Jim says. “I do pretty good woodworking.” But, he says, he’d never consider himself a fine woodworker, one who builds studio furniture. “I just basically became a good woodworker that does good stuff.” (I tell him he’s being humble.)
He admits to being a good teacher — it’s his passion. But he finds it interesting that people confuse the prolific writing he does with this idea that he’s an exceptional woodworker. “I’m much more interested in the process, in teaching the process than I am the product.”
He has no attachment to the things he makes, which likely stems from 25 years of cabinetmaking and spending a month on a project only to sell it to a client and never see it again. His joy, he says, came from the process of making them.
With a number of books under his belt Jim was approached by Tim Lawson at a neighborhood party. Tim thought Port Townsend was the perfect location for a woodworking school. “It’s a very rich learning environment here and there are so many masters of different trades here,” Jim says. “He just approached me and asked me if I’d think about it and I thought about it for about 30 seconds and said, ‘Yeah. Let’s see what we can do.’”
But Jim had one condition. “If I did teach I would only teach the hand tools because I was done with routers and tables saws,” he says. “Well, not exactly table saws but I was absolutely done with routers and power sanders. I gave them all away. I’d be happy to never see one for the rest of my life.”
For Jim this was a circling back to his time as a boat builder, which required lots of hand fitting with planes and chisels. This also meant a return to another love: learning. “I returned myself to studying and practicing and really developing my hand tool skills,” he says. And he now firmly believes that machines aren’t able to teach the same things as hand tools — an intimate connection with the wood is essential. “And for selfish reasons I just didn’t want to be around students and power tools,” he says. “They scare me, the tools scare me to death.”
Jim and Tim teamed up with John Marckworth, and the three founded the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. It officially opened its doors March 8, 2008. Today the school is considered to be one of the finest in the country.
In many ways, Jim has lived several lifetimes but his story, of course, doesn’t end here. About five years ago he attended a lecture about proportional systems and the influence of Grecian architecture in furniture at a Woodworking in America conference given by George Walker, a man he’d never met. And George attended Jim’s lecture on how our bodies inform the form and function of furniture, having never met. At the end of each lecture, Jim and George were asking each other questions the other had never considered. “And basically, we’ve been talking ever since,” Jim says. “He can’t shut up about it. Neither can I. We find there’s always something to learn about the ancient systems that have been in place for thousands of years about designing furniture and building.”
It was after those lectures, at a bar in Chicago, when Jim said to George, “You’ve got to write a book about this stuff.” George said, “I don’t know how to write a book.” But Jim, of course, did. “We just ended up in full collaboration mode,” Jim says.
The duo has formed their own company, By Hand & Eye, LLC, and occasionally meet up to give talks. Recently they both traveled to Los Angeles to give a 90-minute talk to Google’s design team. (And if you haven’t watched the “By Hand & Eye” animation made by Andrea Love, who also was the illustrator of “By Hound & Eye,” you must. You can see it here.)
These days a typical week in Jim’s life includes continuing program development for the Port Townsend School of Woodworking, working on projects for Lost Art Press, woodworking (the day we spoke he said he was headed over to a friend’s house that afternoon to help plank an 18-foot-long rowboat) as well as what he calls “reality maintenance chores.” He also goes to the school two to three times a week, visiting classes.
Since moving to Port Townsend Jim has remarried. His wife, recently retired, worked as a physician for more than 30 years. He has two grown children from his first marriage and now also has a grown son and a 15-year-old who lives at home.
Home is in uptown Port Townsend, an old Victorian town and one of the only Victorian seaports left in the United States. His house is one of the oldest in town. The design of his shop, which was completed a couple years ago, was informed by the existing house. Jim designed the shop and one of the school’s main instructors, a third-generation carpenter named Abel Isaac Dances, took the lead on it. Several graduates from the school’s foundation course spent a summer working as paid apprentices, and together they built 90 percent of the shop using only hand tools.
The town of Port Townsend is small and fairly quiet, except in the touristy summer months. And, it’s walkable. Jim and his wife can walk to the movie theater or down to the water in about 7 minutes. They visit farmers’ market and grow their own herbs and berries — lots of raspberries. “I feel like I’m living this charmed existence,” he says.
Jim says he can’t imagine ever leaving Port Townsend. It’s home. In the years ahead he expects growth in the woodworking school, with expanded programming. “And I always think that the book I’m working on now is the last book I’m ever going to write, and that was six books ago,” he says, laughing. “If I know I have something worthwhile to say I will probably keep writing.”
And ever the life-long learner, Jim plans to continue the role of student. “There are college courses I want to take online,” he says. “I may go back to college for all I know.” He tells the story of his uncle who, at 100 years old, went back to college to major in American history. “I talked to him when he went back to college, and he said, ‘I’m really cheating, actually.’ And I asked him, ‘Why are you cheating?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m majoring in American history and I lived through half of that.’ He was a very funny guy. He was an inspiration to me. He had this love of learning his whole life.”
Jim’s love of learning shows up every day in his shop. “This is what happens to me: I’ll be doing something and I’ll just question, Why am I doing that? I was one of those really annoying students that always asked that question. I even asked why one and one equals two, because that made no sense to me. It turns out it’s a good question, by the way, in mathematics.”
Jim says he loves going back and revisiting things he had been taught, but this time with deeper meaning and explanation. “I want to know the intuitive reason why all these things work,” he says. “I mean, how long did it take me to realize why a plane is called a plane? It’s because it makes a plane. I should have known that. I should have known that 35 years ago. As soon as you say that to someone they whack their foreheads. It’s fun. It’s just really fun and that’s why I keep doing it.”
This constant questioning, thinking, experimenting and processing requires intense focus, which is why Jim enjoys working alone. His shop music is lyric-less: classical, Gaelic or electronica.
This intense focus also requires breaks. For fun, Jim enjoys making gliders. “I make wood that flies, basically,” he says. Made out of balsa, most without motors, Jim says they’re simply hand-launched things that play with the wind. It’s a passion that stems from his childhood, when he would make stick-and-tissue model airplanes.
He’s also keen on keeping himself physically fit, which means walking every day with his wife and rowing solo or with one person most every day in the warmer months. He goes to the gym almost every other day for basic conditioning, in order to continue rowing and working with hand tools as he is now. “When I do that stuff I’m not thinking about all the other stuff,” he says. “I’m just enjoying being outside, getting into nature and getting into the physical exertion of my body.”
The paths in Jim’s life have led him to unexpected places, and yet, the destination has always been the same: figuring out a process with his hands, and knowing and understanding it so deeply he can explain it, simply, to others. “I love being in the position of not knowing but maybe going to find out,” he says. He hopes to keep his eyes as wide open as possible, while not taking things personally and observing slowly. He encourages others, particularly longtime woodworkers, to do the same.
“Pass on what you know while you still can,” he says. “There are a lot of people out there who want to know this stuff. If you have an inclination to teach, do it. You’re not more than you think you know, so pass it on.”
Well no, dear, the curvaceous tapering just makes you look muscular. Or maybe it’s just an optical illusion. Or maybe the builders knew that the swelling, though slight, imparted a bit more strength to the column. But let’s not get hyperbolic and venture too far on these theories. It’s good to leave a little out (speaking elliptically) so let’s step away from this parabolic trajectory of conjecture and look at the types of tapering that can be generated with simple geometric constructions.
In our book “By Hand and Eye,” we showed a simple straight taper – common enough in Roman columns and quite easy to generate. But some columns from Greek antiquity display a taper that follows a curve. As shown in the drawing below, the curves get more radical as you move from parabolic to elliptical to hyperbolic. All were developed, not from a numerically dimensioned layout, but from the generation of a relatively simple geometric construction familiar to ancient artisans.
The parabolic curve is the simplest and fastest to execute. As shown in the drawing, it is simply a matter of dividing up (with dividers of course) the inset amount of the top of the column into equal segments, than running straight lines (with a straightedge or string) from these points to the corner of the column shaft at the base. You then create station points at evenly spaced, horizontal intervals drawn across the length of the column. (I show only four intervals here for clarity – plus I’ve compressed the height-to-width ratio to exaggerate the curve.)
To create the elliptical curve, the artisan drew a half circle to the diameter of the bottom of the shaft, then segmented the half sector into six even slices. Lines drawn vertically from the intersection of the horizontal segments with the rim of the arc create your station points above. The hyperbolic curve station points arise from evenly spaced segments stepped along the circumference of the half circle. And yes, this particular curve does make you look fat.
Here’s an old school carpenter’s (or landscaper’s) method of laying out a line, such as a foundation form or a hedge row, to a specified angle. The tools needed are simple, primitive even: A length of rope marked at a certain distance and a 10′ pole marked in 1′ increments (i.e. the once ubiquitous carpenter’s 1o’ pole). Or you can join the 20th century and use a tape measure.
Let’s jump right in and lay out an 8° angle from a baseline. The drawing above is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll explain it anyway in my hopefully not too pedantic step-by-step fashion:
Step 1: Establish the baseline (via a stretched string) and set a pin (a sharpened stick works) at the focal point where the angle will converge.
Step 2: Make a loop at the end of a non-stretchable rope (i.e. avoid nylon) and run it out along the baseline from the base pin. Measure out 57′ 2-1/2″ from the pin along the rope and make a mark with a Sharpie or tie on a piece of string. Also, set a pin at the baseline at that distance.
Step 3: Now arc the rope away from the baseline in the direction you want to lay out the angle.
Step 4: Set the base of the 10′ pole at the baseline pin and orient it to the rope. When the 8′ mark on the pole passes over the mark on the rope then the angle to the baseline is (drum roll) 8°.
So how does this work you might ask? As my friend Joe Youcha of buildingtoteach.com explained to me: “The answer is buried in the math we were all injected with in grammar school.” We were all told about the “transcendental number” called “pi” which when inputted into your calculator would provide you with either the circumference of a circle based on its diameter or vice versa.
Artisans of antiquity, however, had no knowledge of the decimal number pi. In fact, decimal numbers in general had not been described in detail in the Western world until the late 1500s by the mathematician Simon Stevin. But artisans did have an excellent working relationship with the straightforward (non-cendental?) proportional ratio system. In the case of the relationship of the diameter of a circle with its circumference, they would just step out the diameter into seven segments and know that 22 of those segments would, to a high level of accuracy, give them the length of the circumference. Good enough for government work (such as the Parthenon) as they say.
Because we apparently need to work with degrees (probably because the architect speced out the angle in degrees instead of the length of a chord as they would have in antiquity), we would need to know what number of segments the diameter would be if the circumference were stepped out to 360 segments. That number is, of course, an arbitrary but widely accepted convention since Babylonian times as a convenient way to divvy up a circle. We like it as it can be evenly divided by so many whole number divisions – though for a time Europeans were quite fond of 400 degrees.
But I digress; back to how it works: If you go to the trouble of physically stepping out along the circumference of a circle with dividers, you’ll discover that when 360 segments do the trick, 114 and 5/12ths of another segment will define the diameter. Of course, using al-Jabr (given to us by the Islamic mathematicians), we can quickly solve for this result using an algebraic equation to solve for an unknown.
For this purpose we’ll use half of the diameter segments – fifty seven and two and one half twelfths – to lay out the radius length on the rope. The bottom line: We find that a radius of 57 feet, 2-1/2″ produces a circumference length of 360 feet. So for every foot we swing the arc, we produce an angle of 1°.
We (and our kids) were all inoculated with enough Geometry during middle school to “know” the Pythagorean theorem. You know, the one that enables us to rattle off: “A squared plus B squared equals C squared.” But that particular manifestation of the underlying geometric truth of our particular universe isn’t limited to squares. In the above drawing, we have three hexagons built upon the three legs (labeled A, B and C) of a right triangle. Just like squares, if you add the area of the two little shapes they will equal the area of the biggest one. In other words: A hexagoned plus B hexagoned equals C hexagoned. This works for all similarly shaped polygons by the way.
Want the “proof?” All you need is a couple sticks and a bit of string as in the photo below. Have your 4-year-old lend you a hand…she’ll immediately intuit what an equation is really all about! (No, this is not your rigorous algebraic proof, or even a Euclidean logic proof…Instead it’s what me bandmates used to call: “Good enough for rock and roll.”)