Materiality
Almost every interview I see with a contemporary furniture designer includes a snippet of voiceover where they talk about how much they care about the craft and materiality that goes into their furniture. Those two points get talked about so much and in such a wide variety of contexts that sometimes I wonder if I actually don’t understand what either of those words mean.
To me, a straight backed chair made out of laminated MDF and covered in 10 coats of paint and spray lacquer indicates neither craft nor an interest in materiality. What it indicates is an interest in form. And I know what I sound like now: a grumpy old woodworker. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being interested in form, even at the expense of craft or materiality. In fact, I think it’s absolutely necessary in pushing design forward and if woodworkers ruled the space, we’d all still be sitting in sackback windsors. The craft is, in so many ways, antithetical to the progression of design.
I approach furniture from a craft perspective, which means I think about how a thing is made at the same time, or even sometimes before, I think about how it will look. The two are inextricably linked to me, because I know I’m going to be the one building it. I wouldn’t design the MDF chair because working with MDF is gross and I don’t want to do that.
This is admittedly a little bit of a gate-keepy and elitist mentality, but I’m okay with that. Setting a barrier to entry is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to ensure a high level of output, especially when it comes to craft. One of the downsides to making so many of our crafts accessible is that we now have a lot of badly made stuff in the world. It’s not enough to just want to knit a hat, I want you to want to knit a perfect hat. That doesn't mean you need to turn pro, just that you should dedicate some portion of your life to being the best knitter you can be.
But I digress…
If we’re truly thinking about design from a material point of view, that means we’re considering the material as a dictating (often limiting) factor in the design. Instead of wondering what the nicest material we can build the imagined stool out of is, we wonder what the best use of the material is, even if that means it doesn’t suit the stool you had in mind. We let the material inform the design. The medium is the message. James Krenov and George Nakashima both talk about this at length in their books. They describe it as having a sensitivity to what the wood wants to become, rather than just how you can use it.
Of course, in the real world there will always be some push and pull. I’ve never placed my hand on a piece of wood and heard a voice tell me it wants to be a bedside table. But if I’m building bedside tables, I’ll look for pieces of wood that I think would make especially nice ones. And if I don’t find them, well then I keep looking. And if I find a beautiful piece of timber that doesn’t work at all for that project, I buy it and save it for a project that will (hopefully) put it to its best use.
The point of this is not to shit on designers who aren’t craftspeople. The point is that I think it would be in everbody’s best interest to find a different language to describe it. We all know that good craft certainly does not mean good design (Etsy is full of such things), but let’s not take it for granted that good design has to mean good craft. Not all music has to rock, but rock music does.
