technē and poiēsis

I am staining my pine boards with a pigmented oil. The label on the can says "oak". I am quite conflicted about this.  This blog began from the premise that every material has essential qualities that should not be imitated. These qualities are much more than visual- they include texture, density, reaction to outside forces (weather), and methods of working and tooling. There is absolutely no way of making an oak shelf from a pine board.  In French, the word for "species" of wood is "essence". But in English, the word means a core substance that concentrates all the qualities of something. By colouring my boards, am I denying their essence- in both senses of the term? But it is sometimes hard to decide what actions suppress the essence of a material, and what actions simply bring out its latent characteristics. For example, when I oiled my door handle , the wood became darker and more lustrous. I was amazed to see and feel how different the walnut wa...

My current project is to make a set of open shelves to divide my one-room apartment into 'eating' and 'sleeping' areas. I've learned from experience that when it comes to making, I have to simplify my initial concept until it can be reduced no further- economy of labour, material, and the clarity of the finished object all dictate this minimalism.  I thought for these shelves I had done my thinking well. One vertical post. One inclined post. Five horizontal surfaces. One inclined surface. I just need to make a few cuts and it will be done, right? Of course, it seems simple, but there are a whole series of small tasks that take time to do properly- time that I don't often have between working full time and not being around a whole lot. As a result, four months later, the few cuts I need to make still need to be made. Well, I've done most of them, but there are still some left. I've been learning a lot about working with pine. The difference betwe...

I have a memoir by Simone de Beauvoir by that name. It traces her journey as a young woman before the Second World War. She starts by describing what she feels is absolute freedom- having her own apartment, making her own decisions, exploring Paris. As the memoir progresses and France is occupied by Nazi forces, she realizes that her individual freedom is completely conditioned and circumscribed by her environment. In her case, 'la force de l'âge' is a pun- it means both her physical age, as she grows older and wiser, and the era, its Zeitgeist. Both of these affect the way she understands 'freedom' (liberté). I find myself in a similar position as Simone (I think we're on first-name terms!) at the beginning of her oeuvre. I, too, am starting out in my working life, living on my own, exploring the city of Lausanne which I now call home. And I find I am also discovering the force of age in two senses. The first is the real history of the constructions and t...

Perhaps due to my recent visit to a plywood factory , I have been interested in plywood and its properties. I wanted to try bending legs for a chair, just to get a feel for the material and how it works. This being my first time bending plywood, I made some foolish mistakes. The first one was to cut the strips along the grain, which made them much harder to bend. I used 1/8 inch, which was the thinnest I could find, but it was still pretty tough. I soaked the strips in a bath for a few hours to loosen them up.  When they were wet, I clamped them in position and left them to dry out a bit. They took a long time to dry, though, because they were clamped together. After a day or so, I took them out, glued them, and clamped them back. The glue on the top of the leg was dry after a few hours, but the bottom, where it touched the base of the jig, was still sticky. I took the piece out of the jig and clamped it separately. But, here was another mistake: I was afraid the le...

I have recently bought myself a carving knife and I have been testing it on some walnut that a friend gave me. Due to my interest in the tactility of architecture - or maybe due to Vancouver's new bylaw banning doorknobs - I decided to try carving a door handle. After deciding on the basic outline I cut the shape with a jigsaw. I could really feel the fibres of the wood as I was carving. Pushing up from under them would cause it to splinter easily, and shearing them downwards took more force but was more controllable. Walnut oils really nicely, completely changing the character of the wood. I used olive oil because I didn't have any other kind. To fit the existing latch of the door I had chosen I used a dowel carved into a square rod. The part I had the most trouble with was the spring mechanism. I tried first with an elastic threaded through the centre rod: That did not have enough force to pull the handle back up, so I tried next with a clothespin spri...

How does material acquire value? This question has informed many of the explorations on this website. It is a difficult question because value can have so many meanings. Leaving the definition of value aside for a moment, we can say that material can have value in its substance and/or in its craft. Gold has value in its substance; even a pile of raw dust will be worth something. Many materials, however, have little or no value in their substance, and must be transformed and worked in some fashion. This transformation allows the material to become useful, beautiful, or ideally, both. Due to efficiency and disinterest we often make generic products fit specific needs. Not many people stop to ask if their home, their furniture, or their clothes are actually what they want, or if they were simply the easiest to access or the best of the limited options. Think about it. Is your desk actually the right height for you? Is your chair the perfect fit for your body? Is the window where you...

J'ai eu l'occasion de passer une semaine à Montréal. Ayant déjà visité plusieurs fois la ville, je tentais cette fois de découvrir un peu son côté industriel en visitant une usine de contreplaqué. Ce qui m'étonnait c'était la quantité de main-d'oeuvre nécéssaire. Chaque étape du procès reqiert une inspection visuelle et qualitative, qui ne s'effectue que par des oeils humains. Malgré l'automatisation et l'optimisation qui existe dans n'importe quelle usine, je dirais que la fabrication du contreplaqué est plutôt un art qu'un procès industriel. Je n'avais pas le droit de prendre des photos. J'ai alors tenté de faire des petites illustrations pour que vous pouvez comprendre les étapes, mais je ne vante surtout pas mes abilités de dessin... Les billots qui arrivent à l'usine sont coupés pour faire des longueurs d'exactement neuf pieds. Ils sont cuits à la vapeur pour 24 heures pour qu'ils sont saturés d'eau. Ensu...