These little chairs were produced towards the end of my time in school as my own little John Henry experiment.
While my classmates were diligently iterating on ideas about design and material, I was secretly testing out my own capacities as an assembly line…how many chairs could I produce with how little material in how little time?
Set on losing no time not making furniture in the outside world, I thought if I could engineer a streamlined process thorough enough, I would have a head start on producing plausibly affordable furniture en masse…
I can’t say confidently that I got there at the end of the day. An obsession with working out fussy, time-consuming details (albeit repeatable!) for an otherwise plain chair that wouldn’t see extended use (compared to an armchair or table, persay) might put it out of the realm of “worth it” for an audience at large–but I did end up with four very solid, pleasingly light chairs that I was able to give as a parting gift to my hosts in Seattle while I was in school there.
The legs and rails are all coped to one another and joined with floating tenons made from the off-cut stock of the rest of the chair. The species, Alder, was a choice that my professor demurred as like claiming vanilla your favorite ice cream flavor…which it is! Cheap, soft, and goes with everything. The single back slat is a compound curve assembled from thick veneers milled from the same boards, then shaped along a CNC-milled form.
The formwork for the back rest and the jigs have all traveled with me from place to place over the last few years, a hopeful but latent symbol of potential production…they haven’t yet seen use since their inaugural run, but maybe I’ll find a reason to make another batch one day.
softpaths.blog 
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