These little chairs were my own little John Henry experiment.
Towards the end of my time in school, I secretly wanted to test out my own capacities as an assembly line to discover some proof-of-concept for life outside of the classroom…how many chairs could I produce with how little material in how little time? If I could crack the code, maybe there was a head start to be had on producing plausibly sellable furniture en masse, with just a few tools and a clever design…
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-weight chairs that felt a suitable parting gift to the hosts in Seattle I lived with while in school there.
The legs and rails are all coped to one another and joined with floating tenons made with off-cut stock from 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-milled veneers, then shaped along a CNC form.
While the chairs live in the PNW, the jigs and formwork for the backrest 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.
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