The process of making unfolds a sturdy mechanistic version of myself. It's me but faster, smoother and more confident. It’s who I prefer to be. So making is what I want to do. That realization came to me in my studio a year ago. I was staring blankly at a wall, exhausted, tired and thirsty. It was dark out and I hadn't eaten or had water since I started working that morning. Full engagement had pulled me through an entire day without a hint of hunger or thirst. I didn't notice until my body rose up against me.
Unknowingly, I've been training for a career in design my entire life.
Since my early childhood I've been living a life immersed in good design. As an Italian-American, I come from a culture which invites beauty and practicality into everyday life. It was all around me in my home. My Grandfather, a machinist, had a shop in his basement. One of my earliest memories is of him giving me a chunk of wood and a chisel. I must have been about 6. Together we hacked at this piece of wood to make a toy canoe. Instead, I destroyed the thing. However, I discovered the properties of wood. The material was so hard to control it shocked my early mind. It chipped and tore, resisting alteration even under razor sharp blades. We made a mess. It was formative.
It changed the way I saw the world. Suddenly everything in our built environment flashed with the mystery of hidden processes; a vast history of difficult puzzles and ingenious solutions. Everything I’ve designed and built since, in one way or another, has been a participation in and an unraveling of, that mystery. Through a degree in sculpture and years as a contract oil painter, my overriding interest in problems and their solutions pulled me through.
After my degree, I went out into the world as sponge like as ever. While I can say there are designers and artists who speak to me, (Charles and Ray Eames, TurrelI, Thonet, Kundig, Eli Reich, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin to name a few) I think culture has influenced me most. So while I continued to dabble in art, I really worked to travel. I immersed myself in language and craft and labor to live.
I lived abroad, first in Spain then Italy. Through these places I discovered variations on all the usual objects I had grown up with. Doors, chairs, cars and stationary all had a metric foundation which lent a slight otherworldly quality to them. It is no great leap from the fact that design is constrained in part by a system of measurement to the notion that it is shaped by every aspect of the culture from and for which it arises. Good designs persist when they are elegant and appropriate; economically, functionally, technologically, linguistically, ecologically, geographically, et cetera, et cetera.
Imagine the example of porcelain pottery. At first glance it is mundane, but it represents a design solution so robust it has echoed across millennia and geography. These types of reverberations are all around us. They link us to the past and help direct our future. To be awake to them is nothing short of exhilarating. Surely as we move through the early stages of the information age something comparable to porcelain pottery is taking a foothold now (I've read about it being called "Spime").
Like some great decongestant, global awareness has opened the airways of my mind and there is no undoing it. I have a hard won knowledge based on life and culture which gives me a unique glimpse into the design opportunities inherent in our present moment. This fills me with a sense of urgency to participate. I want my very real passion for design to be included in my community. If it isn’t there already, I want to be the one who brings it.
In July of 2013 I was still the Salvage Services Manager and Senior Estimator for Second Use Building Materials, Inc. Daily, I was called into more Seattle homes slated for demolition or remodel. I assessed the quality and salvageability of everything our company had found a secondary market for. I noted every light fixture, furnishing, plumbing item, flooring system, cabinet, appliance or coat hook...ad infinitum. It's as though I'd been researching the spectrum of our region's good and bad design throughout the past 100 years. During my 7 years there I never stopped making things; stools, tables, knives, light fixtures, storage cabinets, sculpture and more. Yet doing so in my off hours seemed quixotic. Why not do it full time?
The obvious next step was to participate in a vibrant, intellectual and practical community like the CCA. I'm here because it promised access to the tools, experience, and community which could help me span the gap between my little world of private making and the larger world of professional design.
No comments:
Post a Comment