Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Some very Thin chairs......

One thing that I would like to stress with my students is an attitude about materials that I like to refer to as "economy of means" One of my teachers Robert Mangurian discussed this while showing us a saw horse in a workworkers shop in Italy. It was made out of cherry and very,very thin. This is because there has been no forestry in Italy for centuries, so any workworking is carefully done with the least amount of material. Very un-American. These images are examples of chairs that use very little material at just the right points to understand the structure-basically the material thinner-just where you need it. These chairs are; A Shaker chair, the Bourellec steelwood chair, Gio Ponte's Superleggra chair and Thonet no.14 chair.