Furniture Designers and Material Ignorance
By David Savage
Teaching furniture making is relatively straightforward, teaching furniture design is another matter. I subscribe to the idea of education being a process of leading out. In bald terms, showing people various methods and processes, letting them have a crack at it, and then helping them if they fall down.
One of my great arguments is against designers not taking sufficient account of their material. Time and again we see designers, especially architects, proficient in computer modelling attempting to create a form in a material of which they have almost no real comprehension. A good example of this is seen in the work of the architect Armanda Levete who at the recent Furniture Futures Symposium at the Victoria and Albert Museum described how she wanted a particularly fluid design for a one legged table. That's fine and pretty, but she wanted it created in Carrara marble. She waxes lyrical about working with the skilled stone masons from Carrara. She described how at one point the supporting pillar needed thinning and it was the judgment of the mason that was decisive in arriving at the finished form. Now I ask who was in charge here, the architect with the CAD program and the long polished fingernails or the craftsman with a chisel? Design in this context is always a collaboration. However without knowledge of the material the designer is at the mercy of the craftsmen. He will tell her what's to go on here because he knows something and she doesn't.
The development of computer aided design and virtual modelling has been a revolutionary and positive development putting another powerful tool in our creative toolbox. However one of the darker aspects is that it encourages designers to lose contact with their material. It may well be okay in steel or plastics, materials which have a consistency that can be specified. But when you work in materials with variance of structure and grain, materials such as marble or timber a little more humility and a lot more knowledge is appropriate.
Study at our woodworking school and you can become a designer maker who knows their material inside-out, designing and making hands on.
David Savage is an Internationally recognized professional Furniture Maker and Designer with over 30 years experience. David runs the furniture making workshop in Shebbear, in the beautiful county of Devon in England. David can be contacted through his Woodworking courses website
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