WordsWood

Last year, Little Black Pearl, a community arts center in Hyde Park launched a charter school called the Options Laboratory, offering an arts and technology-based curriculum for young folks that have had trouble succeeding in traditional educational environments.  They are also running a series of after-school programs, including a poetry class and a woodshop experience.  Meshed together, under the auspices of a grant won by local arts education non-profit Urban Gateways, the program was named WordsWood.  On Thursday afternoons, a crew of nine young men would be studying poetry with local writer Avery Young, and on Fridays, they would be working on designing and building some chairs with me.  


I started out the curriculum with a simple exercise: measuring our own bodies and a bunch of different chairs.  The idea was to engage the students in realizing that there are reasons behind the way things are in the world, on a meta-level -- why chairs are the height they are, why they are the width they are, why doorknobs are the size they are, etc. -- and work on the practical skills of reading a tape measure, making readable sketches, and translating real-world data into a visual form.  We discussed different kinds of drawings -- elevations, plans, and sections, and got familiar with the dimensions of our world.

The modern wing of Little Black Pearl arts center.

RX Workshops

I signed up to teach some of the ReBuilding Exchange's Make It-Take It workshops this spring.  Each Sunday for a few months, I taught two three-hour classes on how to make a simple home project -- a wine rack, a laptop/bed-in-breakfast tray, a bench, an end table, a kitchen blackboard, and a crash course in bandsaw taxidermy, creating a wooden facsimile of a mounted deer head.  Promoted through Groupon, we got a healthy turnout throughout, though we lost some folks to the wiles of good weather and playoff hockey.  


All the projects are crafted out of lumber from the vast RX warehouse.  For the wine rack, I wanted to go as simple as possible while retaining a healthy dose of visual theatrics.  Given the beauty of our source material, we didn't need to go too crazy -- the old-growth pine and fir speaks for itself, dense, rich, and finely-figured.  I settled on a slanted L-shape, punched with three holes, allowing the bottles to cantilever out into space.  This makes the bottles the centerpiece, leaving the rack to recede somewhat.  

Rack 'em.

Sunday in the Shop

Sunday, I took advantage of a rare free day in the ReBuilding Exchange shop to work on a new project and photograph some old ones.  My Scrap Armchair came together pretty well, but, as usual, there are a number of problems with it.  One, I didn't get the ergonomics right, so the back is too vertical, and hits the spine at a less-than-ideal location.  Two, the maple floorboards I used for the back and seat are flat, failing to conform to the body.  Three, the frame is really bulkier than it needs to be, strength-wise.  Four, I thought I could make the exposed fasteners look attractive, but I should've used dowels, or at least plugged over them.  

As modeled by chair impresario Blake Sloane.