CFDA Newsletter

Announcements:

Rhomboidal Training Tables - Chris Brandel: Industrial furniture design is an intricate and involved process. Chris Brandel recently worked on the design of a rhomboidal training table. He will walk us through the process from concept to engineering and from marketing to production.

IDEAS FOR FUTURE SHOWS --Last month the CFDA sent out a request to the members for ideas for future shows and thoughts on suitable venues. We have some ideas developed at the Nov. meeting which are summarized here. But we need to hear from as many of the members as possible so this request will be included in the NL for the next few months and brought up in the business meeting as well. You don't have to wait until the next meeting. Any thoughts can be relayed directly to Dwayne Sperber <dsfurnituremaker@wi.rr.com>

Let us hear from you !!!

CAN YOU TOP THESE SHOW IDEAS????
PRINT THIS OUT AND PIN IT UP WHERE YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IT

Architecture as furniture

Transformative furniture

Casual furniture (furniture BEING casual?)

'Design can change'

Tables: No Reservations

Commercial Pieces - pieces made with an eye towards mass production and not master-craftsmanly, lovingly put together.

Whatever the furniture equivalent might be of the idea of 'dinner for four for under $10"

A Chicago theme

The (in)famous '10 board-foot Challenge' To level the playing field for the metal workers and the woodworkers, we'd also maybe want to modify that to a fixed dollar amount for materials, or to have everything taken from one 4X8 sheet of material, etc.

Arches

Make whatever you want, but it must fit into a shipping box of X" by X". This promotes transportability and encourages people to buy, as they can put it in the back seat/trunk/bed area of their vehicles.

Using stock, commercially available millwork components to create all of the fabric of the piece.

Found-object art -- although this means that by definition the piece is a one-off and cannot be reproduced, either easily or at all.

Begin with a bag of hardware. Everyone gets, say, a bag with five pieces of hardware in it. Then go design something around the hardware. It was suggested that to liven things up we might want to, say, only include in the bag singles of objects that usually come in pairs (just one hinge, just one caster, etc...). Ask Hafele if they'll provide (or even select!) the contents for the bags. But everyone's bags must contain the same pieces. (This also promotes a tie-in with another company.)

"The One That Got Away" - what if we finally built a piece that we designed and specked out to a client but which never was built after all was said and done?Design anything you want - but it must have a maximum sale price of "X". This is down-turned economy-conscious design.

One-Of A-Kind furniture show. What if it's an unapologetic marketing piece? High end labor, high end materials, a tour de force in design? Sales would likely be low, but design and execution would sell the show as an idea

Modular furniture. Not knockdown - modular.

To riff on Modular, what if each of us starts with a similar module and then takes off on it from there. So each piece might look related to other pieces in the show.

Vignettes. Two or three designers could work together to fill a space of X-by-Y dimensions and build related pieces as a cohesive design solution for areas of the home. Rather than designing just one piece that may or may not relate to the rest of the home, we'd now be looking at a wider view and providing 'decor', not just 'design'.

"From The Crate". Build a box, add staged packing materials, then insert a piece into the box that may be left intentionally disassembled or incomplete in some way. Given the sorts of things we've all seen come out of packing boxes, this could be wild (intentionally broken/mashed corners and all!)

CFDA Garage Sale (also possibly known as the "CFDA: Off The Rack:) Pieces that we've already built and have sitting, gathering dust.

We also briefly touched on an opportunity that we may be missing. We're all designers, but only most are makers. Is there any merit in creating a show around 2-D designs instead of 3-D completed pieces? It would perhaps give us an opportunity to put a show together on a shoestring budget, with a quick turn-around time and to be in venues that traditionally have been unrealistic because of square footage issues. We could finally focus on the true 'design' aspect of what we do. To execute this, perhaps everyone is given the opportunity to use a foamcore board of, say, 24" by 36" and to show the evolution of a piece coming to life (much like the Deceptive show's documentation that's behind each piece).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CFDA Meeting Report:

CFDA Meeting Minutes - Tuesday, December 9, 2008

There were twelve members and three guests in attendance.

The meeting began at 6:40 with Chris Brandel mentioning that last month's show topic list will be further explored during the January meeting, as well as through any offline avenues needed.

Per John, the officers for 2009 will include Chris as President once again, Dolly Spragins as VP, Matt Seiler as Secretary, and Lloyd Natof as treasurer.

John will remain the program chair, but is actively seeking a second chair position to help with the process.

Additionally, the CFDA is finding that it would be helpful to more formalize the role of someone to help scout new venue locations and to help solidify the intersection of venues and show topics. Dwayne Sperber had expressed interest in this sort of a role, but doesn't feel that he could go it alone. So if there is anyone who is available to work in tandem with Dwayne please express your interest.

Lloyd mentioned that the sporadic job formerly done by the Membership Committee might be more easily and repeatedly done within his position as Treasurer. He's getting membership dues, anyway, and it might be a fairly straightforward function to send out a membership welcome package after the dues have been received.

The Newsletter Editor, Rob Frazier has also requested some assistance. Matt Seiler and Celia Greiner have both expressed interest in working with Rob to see what it is that's required.

At this point introductions were exchanged between the attending members and the new visitors to the meeting.

Chris mentioned that the Rising From Ashes show has been invited to a gallery in Champaign for the November, 2009 time frame and for only four weeks. At this point there is no money budgeted from the gallery to help defray transportation or advertising expenses. But Edith Makra and the WUT may be available for help on this point. Much more information would be required on several fronts to be able to make a qualified set of decisions.

And we have also been invited to the U of Wisconsin at Madison for an eight-week stay in Spring of 2010. This show opportunity apparently comes with a reported $2,000 budget for transportation and advertising. And it dovetails nicely into Wisconsin's recent discovery of the EAB within their borders.

But additionally, the Rising From Ashes show has already required a tremendous amount of both John and Dolly's time - at the expense of their regular lives and businesses. Work towards new venues would, by definition, require that a new Show Chair take up the charge. We're amenable to the show continuing, but our current Show Chairs have expressed a very understandable need to step aside for those efforts.

The net effect is that the CFDA is sure that any new venues for the Ashes show will require a financial commitment from the venue and a new show chair in order to carry forward.

The business meeting concluded at 7:08

PROGRAM:
LLOYD NATOF'S analysis of the furniture of his great-grandfather, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.

Lloyd began the presentation by showing a cover from Town and Country magazine from July of 1937. It was a series of flags, but laid out on a bias and without any borders.

Lloyd started here as it's really an encapsulation of many elements of his great-grandfather's work. The angles, the repetition and the lack of the use of borders figure prominently within Wright's work. And, interestingly enough, Lloyd reported that this item was 'up in the attic' when he was a kid. Aaaah, the life.

Lloyd reported that he faced a few logistical challenges when selecting what to talk about. The biggest issue is that Wright's body of work was enormous. And then some pieces carry the stigma of being reportedly 'uncomfortable'. So rather than discussing the pieces on their own, we gained a better sense of Wright's work by looking at these pieces in context.

The core issue is that Wright's furniture is best viewed in the context of the era, including the materials and the compositional complexity of what he was trying to achieve. The furniture was not merely a place for the body to inhabit. Rather, it was an element within the greater composition of the homes that he designed.

For it is within the compositional view of the space that we see what Wright was actually doing with his furniture.

Wright's work was always geometrically based. He was sensitive to the materials and the building properties of those materials. But he took the materials to task. They became the means to a very specific end. They served his composition. Composition was the alpha and the omega. The furniture either served it or wasn't there at all.

Lloyd continued by showing Wright's 'sticks and implied volumes'. Negative spaces were featured prominently. His use of lines implied spaces. At this point in Wright's work there were many, many iterations of the same ideas. As if he were still 'working it out'. For Wright, the idea of the thing was far more important than the making of the thing.

Within this work we saw that Wright ignored the outer border edges of the object and, instead, set the tone for the piece by creating a new, inner border which was of his choosing. And then he worked the details within his new borders. Again, we're back to the composition.

Wright furthered this by featuring so-called 'projected trim' to punctuate the change in how we perceived the edges of a piece. He used trim to offset the relationship of legs and shelves and stretchers.. They helped differentiate the elements, yet retained the coherency of the composition.

Lloyd transitioned to Wright's own change from sticks to slabs. At this point Wright was truly approaching the volumetric. He was using bigger chunks of things and moved from sticks of wood to great rounds and slabs, cubed bases, and rectangular solids as legs. And in this work, he eschewed the use of aprons below table tops and between legs. With the absence of an apron he gave both the top and the legs an independence from one another.

It's probably worth noting that Wright carried a life-long aversion to anything relating to the Victorians and what, reportedly, he viewed as 'occult symmetry'. Put more clearly: symmetry purely for symmetry's sake with little regard for whether it helped or hindered the overall composition. By freeing himself from being a slave to this symmetry he was able to help create a new compositional language of form within his pieces.

The next major phase involved the use of polygons. His work became an exploration of planes and how they intersect and interact. Slab tops featured mitered/folded edges, continuing the grain from the top to the outer edges. Wright wanted as little as possible to get in the way of how his geometries were perceived.

This was also the beginning of Wright's use of rotation. Elements were twisted and turned as they related and intersected. And, inevitably, this led Wright to new ways of expressing the subdivision of his polygons. Hexagons subdivided into triangles very well, it seems. And many of Wright's pieces from this period show this rotation and subdivision with stunning clarity.

With the larger slab tops inevitably came the use of wide/long cantilevers. The work now became robust enough to be self-supporting and allowed for unattached corners. When questioned about it, Lloyd said that he believed that Franks' work was about the slabs first and that the cantilevers were secondary and not the primary compositional idea. Wright was really focused on how we perceive the edges of things.

Lloyd then segued into Wright's chairs, and how seating became 'seating for effect'. They featured asymmetry. Sticks. Planes. Stack laminations. Barrel forms. Planes and intersections of planes. Some of it bordered on 'wood origami'. Throughout all of the examples, the chairs were serving a role within the space first, and for the human body second.

This point of view was highlighted by a photo of a rectangular table surrounded by very high, very straight backed chairs. In effect, the soaring, straight backs to the chairs created a new 'room' within the room, lumbar support be damned.

It was really intriguing to see some examples of furniture that Wright designed for Heritage Henredon and for their mass production. Little would survive today's cookie-cutter mass-market scrutiny, as it still likely required a good bit of hand work. Even with an eye towards mass production Wright still played with some compositional details to make them more interesting.

Lloyd's presentation really served to illustrate how Wright's compositional sense and his training in architecture informed his furniture designs. The furniture designs were born in plan and elevation and then given to local makers to bring to life. And what a life they have lived.

Unlike Mies van der Rohe, who built one type of home for other people and then chose to live in a wholly different style, himself, Wright lived every day with his creations. Taliesen West, one of Wright's homes in his final years, sports example after example of how he, himself, lived and worked among his own designs. For him they weren't designed purely for other people. His compositions - his furnishings - were meant to be lived in. And he did.

We left the world of Frank Lloyd Wright at 8:30 PM, with applause all around.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MEMBER PROFILE
In view of the length of this Newsletter we are holding over the Member Profile until next month.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------