The Brothers Bouroullec

Today, I took a bike ride down the side of Lake Michigan for my inaugural visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Despite having lived here for more than a year, I've never made it down to the MCA. Sitting in the shadow of the Hancock building and Mies' Lakeshore towers, the building is a strict concrete box.

They seem to favor the blue and green.

The show that finally lured me downtown was Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec: Bivouac. The Bouroullecs are French brothers, born in the early 1970s, who have been practicing since the mid-nineties. They first started garnering some serious attention around the time I was an undergraduate studying architecture, popping up in the design glossies and various museums. By 2009, when they appeared in Gary Hustwit's industrial design documentary Objectified, they had ascended to a rare plane, working across the borders of art, architecture, furniture design, design theory, and mass-market manufacturing. They have produced pieces for  Cappellini, Ligne Roset, Alessi, and Vitra, amongst others.

L-R: Michael Darling, Erwan Bouroullec, Ronan Bouroullec.

Bent Cardboard

Me and cardboard furniture go way back. I built my first series of cardboard chairs for my freshman design studio, a decade ago this fall. I made three, each relying on a system of intersecting grids to support the seat. The next two years I also made cardboard chairs, entering them in the Chair Affair, a competition sponsored by the American Institute of Architecture Students. I made a stool from Fed-Ex mailing tubes, with a woven seat, and a cantilever chair, combining corrugated material with laser-cut chipboard and cardboard tubes. 

The FedEx stool, one of my first (and ugliest) attempts at cardboard furniture.

All five of these efforts were rather clumsy, each in their own way. They were some of my first chairs, and each was less than ergonomically ideal, suffering from a wide range of dimensions as I cast around for a set of good proportions. None of them were terribly durable, although two survive to this day, albeit with intermittent use. Aesthetically, I'm not thrilled with any of them, and only show photos here as a window to the process.

Another early effort, covered in a really ineptly applied, wrinkly-ass coat of paper-mache.

The Neuroticism of Craft

Last year, I designed and built a series of six chairs from road signs, all nearly identical.  The chair shells were folded aluminum signs and the bases were made from good 'ol Alabama pecan wood, milled, sanded, and lacquered within an inch of their life.  They turned out pretty well. I wrote an article about them, got paid, and enjoyed them for about a week.  Then, one day after work, I sat down in one of them, and the two joints in the back legs blew out.  The chair collapsed.  I smacked my elbow and my head pretty hard on the way to the floor.


Time passed.  The rest of the chairs seemed fine, more or less; the broken one had a flawed joint in the back, which gave way once my weight was leaned back into the seat.  However, I was nervous every time I sat in one from there on out, and especially nervous that someone else, perhaps bigger than me, might sit in one and break it.  I'm fine with breaking my own creations, but the paranoia and anxiety and embarrassment around the idea of someone else possibly injuring themselves and thinking I was a moron was almost too much to handle.  


I had broken a cardinal rule of design -- putting form above function.  In my desire to have a sleek, light form, I had ignored some structural considerations.  The back legs were extremely slanted -- over 20 degrees.  That joint, where the cross-piece intersected, bit too deeply into those back legs, weakening the wood there.  The legs splayed in only one axis -- front-to-back -- which made the chair unstable side-to-side.  The stock for the legs, at 1" square, was not strong enough to resist the twist and tension in the folded aluminum signs, which meant the legs didn't all hit the ground evenly once the base was bolted to the sign.  The 3/4" dowels I used as cross pieces were also not strong enough to resist side-to-side motion.  The base was essentially a series of parallelograms, with no triangulation, which led to a lack of stiffness.

The original chairs, pretty as you please.

On (Design) Failure

As a designer, I like to think I can anticipate everything.  Most architects and builders do.  It is, after all, our job to figure everything out before mortar hits brick, or rain hits roof, or ass hits seat.  However, design is not that simple.  Prototypes, drafts, and painstaking iterative improvement are an integral part of any good design process.  

My process, in particular, is based on prototyping, debugging, and then, hopefully, forward progress.  That said, sometimes things just go sideways on a fella.  Recently, I reported on a productive weekend in the shop, working on some new chairs made from an old feta cheese barrel, designed to address some of the shortcomings of my Scrap Armchairs.  One of the main problems with those chairs, the flat seat and back, would be solved with the nice, ergonomic curve of the barrel staves.  I worked out a new frame, built it, cut mortises to accept the barrel staves, and glued up the whole thing.  

What follows is a photo-illustrated journal of the complete failure of that process.  I thought it might be useful to show how something fails, why it fails, and what lessons to salvage out of the whole mess.  

Chair frames, made from reclaimed old-growth pine (maybe fir, not a wood ID expert).  Simple notched joints, glued and pegged with dowels for additional strength.