The Boom

I'd say it's pretty fair to say that Waterloo is in the middle of a construction boom with a number of large building projects related to the universities and the development of more vertical density in the downtown (uptown) core. Everywhere you turn it seems there is a crane and a construction site overrun with pickup trucks, construction waste, and men in hardhats. Sometimes I just feel like going to live in the woods...

I think Hollerado offers a good thought in the line "Do you do the doot da doot do?". My taoist inclinations make me think about doot da doot doing a bit more these days.

I leica my panasonic...

I just got a new digital camera, a Panasonic LX-3 which has a lovely Leica lens in it. This camera is supposed to bring the best of SLR to the compact digital world and so far I'm pretty impressed. It has full manual control and some pretty advanced features. A good lens also makes big difference and this Leica seems pretty good. I used to be happy with little Canon, but after seeing the images it brings me closer to my SLR film camera. This camera also shoots in a 16:9 ratio which I like so far. Anyways here are some pics from a grey October afternoon:

Revisited

I had built this coffee table about a year ago, and it was neat to see it again.

It's sort of nice to see your work still vibrantly existing in the universe. It was a special piece of wood and a nice thing to see it still looking great.

Stability and Accuracy

I had just finished reading a book about Japanese carpentry and roof construction when I took a closer look at a new building being built in Waterloo. The book is called "The Genius of Japanese Carpentry", and details the reconstruction of a Japanese shrine from the ground up. It focuses on one building and shows the detail and extreme accuracy involved in building a roof structure that will last for centuries.

The curve of the above roof is approximated by 5 pieces of lumber, they look like 2x10's from the ground, that for some reason shocks me. The 5 pieces aren't even evenly spaced, there are three 12' pieces followed by a short 4' piece then another 12'er...I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly with the master carpenter in Japan...

..and in other exciting news...dimensional instability in wood is a BIG deal! A lovely exaggeration of this was found in my garage, where two identical pieces of wood do a nice job of showing what happens when one is saturated with water and the other isn't. Just another reminder to pay attention to grain direction and dimensional change!

Sprints

Cyclists know what a town sign signifies, a time to throw it into your big ring and hammer to the line in the hopes of winning the sprint finish into a sprawling metropolis like Wellesley, Crosshill, or Lisbon. I'm thinking of doing a series of these town signs, rural Ontario sort of has a hold on me it seems...

I also found this nicely balanced farm on a dirt road I usually use to avoid the highway. There's a nice little gravel climb at the end, and at the top there's this farm.

Sketching

Here are a couple of sketches I did in and around Galt for the sketching course I'm taking. Everything is done with ballpoint pen, something I didn't really like at first, but is now growing on me.

Black and White

Of late I've been trying to improve my sketching, which means I've been down in Galt at the architecture school taking a course with some MArch students.Three hours a week you can find me out in the sunshine doodling some buildings with a ballpoint and a 7x10 pad. At first I was somewhat put off by the idea of using a cheap old ballpoint, but it is actually revealing itself to be quite the handy tool. As a side project I've been spending some time developing my B&W photo skills (get it...developing) in the architecture school's dark room. Thanks to the great help I've gotten there I can now develop my own film and make my own prints. The shot above is my Spears smoother plane, a great tool...and a pretty good photograph.

Sitting Rethought

My latest adventure is working on a chair design for an Italian furniture maker, Lago, which I can't really talk about...but what I can talk about is a cool book I found while developing the chair for Lago. The book is titled Rethinking Sitting, and is written by Peter Opsvik. Opsvik is a famous Norwegian designer that created objects like this:

In the book he basically explores the notion of sitting as being somewhat unnatural for human beings as primates. We should be swinging in a tree or balancing on a branch that is swaying in the wind. Instead of this we have adopted very static chair designs that have us rigidly positioned for hours on end. Introducing the idea of multiple positions, flexibility, and balance makes chairs more enjoyable as we transform their static nature into something more dynamic.

The point that got through to me the most was when Opsvik was talking about the somewhat ingrained importance of constantly shifting our balance. Opsvik argues that you would never stand against a wall in one rigid position for extended periods, instead we shift our weight, shuffle our feet, and generally just wiggle. The lack of movement makes the rigid standing position against the wall unnatural and painful. Our muscles didn't evolve to be constrained, they were meant to be used, to be active and dynamic. Sitting still is against our human nature it would seem (kids never seem to sit still, do they?)...

So with this idea in mind I'm starting to think a little bit differently about sitting. Maybe there are other things we should be rethinking too...

Ey

My time here in France is just wrapping up, but I'm still coming across some incredibly beautiful landscapes. The Col d'Ey isn't the world's biggest or hardest climb, but the views are just wonderful. I know that I'm a cycling nut, but there is just no better way to experience a country than on a bike.

Bears (or any quadruped really)

I was thinking about design and the idea of what makes an object really something special. It's somewhat obvious that some people are more critical when examining objects than others, but it's always surprising to me to hear someone complement a piece of furniture that I look at crookedly because of its poor workmanship or strange proportions. Does art or design really play an important role in our lives as a source of enrichment, or are we as a society so choked with cheap chipboard crap that any solid-wood piece of furniture automatically becomes worthy of esteem...sometimes it seems that way to me, but maybe I'm not generous enough to the idea of subjectivity and personal taste.

I don't claim to be a great photographer, but when I take a picture I put effort into its composition. I turn on a light, I make sure I walk the extra ten feet so the power lines aren't in the shot, I adjust my film speed, waste a few frames, check to see if things are centered, turn the object around to get the best angle. Composition is something I think a lot of people who don't actively "create" don't worry about, or maybe they just don't understand it. For me composition is the hardest part of furniture building, but that's not to say that the skill needed in construction is something I've mastered, just that composition is really hard.

Here's a table I drew up while thinking about the way that a bear lumbers along a path in the woods. All the legs should be tapered, but really what I was trying to convey with this sketch is a sense of motion...

Black and White

I've been working a bit on my creative skills while I've been here in France, some sketching and some photography. I had picked up a cheap $80 SLR camera (which used to cost $600 before the digital revolution) and I've been taking some black and white (or noir et blanc) shots. Poorly digitized, here are six of my favourites so far:

Even more shots can be found on my france2010 website.

Top and Bottom

From the top:

From the bottom:

Mont Ventoux is referred to as the bald giant of Provence and is quite the place. At 1909m it's not the tallest mountain, but it's history in the Tour makes it one of the magical cycling places on this planet. I had a funny conversation the other day with this old French guy in the village we're staying in about bikes...I was wearing my pink jersey and we were about to head off when he comes up and starts asking us about our bikes... Aluminum? Carbon?...He picks mine up to judge the weight (I think he was disappointed by my 20lb aluminum beast)...I can sort of understand him, but his French seems pretty flavoured with the local Provencal twang...then he asks me how many km's I've put in this year, but I haven't had a computer for a while so I just point to where my computer would be and he understands...then he says you don't need a computer you just need your heart (while pounding his chest)...he wishes us good luck and we head out...that was pretty cool.

I took some pictures with my 35mm film camera at the top of the mountain in black and white...they're at the photomat now, but I think there'll be a couple great shots in there.

Welcome to France

France is a great country, something I learned while driving halfway across it due to the Volcano eruption that made me rebook my flight through Barcelona. I'm staying near a medieval village, Vaison la Romaine, a suitably named Roman era town with a nice market and some great history. I'm hoping to do some sketching and work a bit on my proportions, something the Romans were experts at....I'm not real big on Classical design in general, but you have to appreciate the way they lay out their geometry! I've been reading George Walker's blogand he's real big on that kind of stuff...

We got a real nice haul from the market today, some fresh cheese, an old cave aged mountain cheese, heirloom tomatoes (which are gorgeous from a pure aesthetics standpoint) and some delicious Provencal olives.

My French is coming back to me little by little, we'll see how I am after a month!

Kanna

My first kanna arrived today all the way from Japan:

I don't know what this says:

...but the dai is a nice quarter sawn piece of oak...

...this says the same thing as the box, which I'm guessing is "katsusaburo", the name of the plane..

...overall a neat thing, but due to some humidity issues (or lack thereof) I'm still waiting to get to use it. You see the blade is stuck and I can't get it out to make the modifications needed to the dai that are required for a new kanna. I think that traveling from humid Japan to the dry Canadian winter of Ontario has caused the block to dry out and shrink quite a bit and lock the blade in place.

Engineers.......

Last week I got the chance to give a lecture to a class I'm TAing at the University of Waterloo. The course is based around social design factors and is meant to be a course that helps expand the engineering students' perspective about the design process. Here's a link to my slides:

Craft, Design, and the Engineer

A little Nakashima, a little Lago, and some Sam Maloof for good measure...getting the opportunity to talk about these things was nice because it gave me a chance to think about how the design of something as simple as a chair can be really quite a complex thing. Some of the students really seemed to appreciate what I was talking about...that was really rewarding.

Get a Handle on It!

I've started on a handled smoothing plane made out of ziricote...I've just got the handle roughed out, but I'm looking forward to working a bit more on it. I've said it before, but ziricote is a bizarre wood to work.

On a completely different topic I was thinking about how weird it is to have your work evaluated by people. For the past year or so I've had a coffee table on display at a cafe that I frequent pretty regularly, and it's kind of a strange experience to hide behind a coffee and hear people talk candidly about your work without them realizing you're person who made the thing they're talking about. Most of the time people seem to like my work, or even really like it, but I've definitely had a couple of bad reviews too. Selling craft is hard, real hard. It's definitely something I need to work on.

ABC's

So I've decided to try to learn some Japanese. To be honest, all of those "character" languages have kind of scared me as a roman alphabet user, but apparently the Japanese have sort of combined the best of both worlds. Although they do use some pictograms, where one character basically means an entire word, for the most part their language is syllabic with syllagrams for the limited number of syllables in their language. According to the book I'm reading there are about 110 basic sounds in Japanese, versus about 8000 in English, which also makes things a lot easier to wrap your head around.

The characters at the top of this post represent the basic vowel sounds, and also my attempt to start learning the hiragana character set. This is the equivalent of a little kid learning how to print, and is a humbling experience. It's on to the consonantish sounds tomorrow and trying to imprint the strokes into my brain.

Thanks for the show!

We had our show today, Three F's, and it was a great success. Thanks to everyone who came out and thanks to Nik and Adam for showing their work with me. An extra special thanks to the fine folks at Sablétine fine pastries for hosting us.

KW-WCC

So I'm sharpening in my kitchen these days, not the greatest set up, but it gets the job done. I'm sharpening because I'm now back to working, this time out of the KW-WCC. The KW Woodworking and Craft Centre is quite the place, a whole bunch of great equipment and a whole bunch of old guys whose wives want them out of the house. If you need a place to work in Waterloo I'd definitely recommend it.

A New Show - Three F's

There's a new show coming up featuring the work of me and a couple of my friends. There will be great photographs, fantastic fashion, and some nice furniture. It will all weave together with the themes of wood and destruction.

Reception and show are from 2-5pm, Sunday February 7th, at Sabletine Fine Pastries, 203 King St. S., Waterloo ON.

Come out, bring your friends, and come see some great local art and craft!