technē and poiēsis

Having built out of bricks, and out of wood, I am now completing my Three Little Pigs story by building out of straw. I was lucky to meet Nicole, who is building her own straw bale house in a small village in Switzerland. See her blog here:  http://www.lamaisonenpaille.blogspot.ch/ When baled, straw behaves partly like a substance, partly like a module. It is dense enough to require a saw to cut it, and it holds its shape when notched or sliced. (Of course, the bales need a certain thickness and density for this to work.) And yet, bales can be reshaped by shifting the straw around inside the strings. They can be taken apart and reconstituted (although we try to avoid that because they are always less dense than the first time) They can be compressed.  Bales are directional, with all of the stalks running parallel. At first, Nicole wanted to build her walls with the stalks running parallel to the wall, but she switched to perpendicular. With the stalks running parallel,...

I thought I would share with you some pictures of a past carving project. I learned from my first set of buttons  how to feel for the fibres of the wood under the knife, how they shear much easier than they rip. I also learned that I should use very fine grit sandpaper before oiling for a nicer finish.  As with most things, I needed multiple tries to find a system of carving that worked- also because I needed to clamp the toggle right up until the very end, to be able to work on it. So I did half at a time with pencil lines to guide me.

I have been living with the shelf in my apartment for a couple months. I am quite happy with the way it divides the small space into two distinct areas, as well as the way it draws attention to the high ceiling. I am still not convinced that staining was the best idea- it is still sometimes a bit sticky. But I am also happy that I chose to make wooden connections. I think they are truer to the idea I had conceived. L'étagère avec tout le bordel du quotidien!

I recently visited a factory that makes prefabricated concrete parts. I was astounded by the amount of handwork and artistry is involved in making the pieces, just as I was at the plywood factory . It turns out that brick - which has the connotation of being close to the hand and human scale - is in fact the construction piece that can be fabricated with the least human contact. (see here ) Concrete, the actual substance of cement mixed with aggregate, is the least of the ingredients. Prefabricated concrete parts are actually made of a lot of carpentry and a lot of metalwork. The density of metal was impressive. Each rod has to be bent to the right shape and tied into place with wire. The bending of the metal is done mostly by machine, especially for the repetitive pieces. But the wiring is done by hand. I watched a worker deftly twist many pieces using a kind of large crochet hook. Reinforced concrete is probably the construction technique that has had the most impact on ...

When I tried to express my concerns for changing and disguising materials (see previous post), a colleague replied very aptly: "But it's not about disguise. When they add a coat of lime to stone walls, it's not a question of hiding the stone, but of protecting it, and reflecting the sun." So she knew intuitively the conclusion I came to through experience. For the shelf I initially wanted all the pieces just to slot together or hold by friction. I changed my mind because I wanted to be sure they would stay straight, even with heavy books, and my sawing skills were a bit too approximate for my liking. Then I was thinking I would use wooden dowels to peg the pieces together. Finally, I decided I would assemble it with screws first, just to make sure the pieces fit, and then make the wooden connections. But it has been several weeks and I have been using the shelf with the screw connections, trying to decide if I want to take it apart to put it back together with wo...

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...