golden rectangle vesica piscis coffee table
After cutting my furniture design/making teeth on an initial collection of Donald Judd inspired apartment furniture, I turned my attention towards another source of inspiration that would not only challenge me academically as a designer, but would also challenge me as a maker, fabricator and aspiring woodworker.
I was fascinated, bordering on obsessed, with the furniture designs of Gerrit Rietveld. Gerrit Rietveld was not only an architect and furniture designer, but the son of a cabinetmaker. Whereas Donald Judd turned to others, i.e., skilled craftsman, to fabricate his designs, Rietveld initially fabricated his own designs evolving his work out of the combination of mind and hand, i.e., conceptualizing and constructing, the mental and the making.
Additionally, my interest in Rietveld included Rietveld’s “open forms,” most visible to me in his design for a sideboard, “Although it was meant as a sideboard, its form is open and could even be enlarged into an almost infinitely repeated structure which would automatically place it in an entirely unforeseeable spatial relationship.” (Daniel Baroni, The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Barron’s, Woodbury, New York, 1978, p.46)
June 24, 1991, I co-purchased a brick two-flat in Chicago’s North-Center neighborhood. Our brick two-flat included a basement. I appropriated a portion of the basement as a wood-shop/workshop which allowed me to finally move my furniture making operations out of my parent’s garage. The more I learned about woodworking, the more I learned which aspects of woodworking I preferred to perform with hand-tools and which operations benefitted from machines like a jointer, planer, table saw, and drill press, all of which I acquired and put to immediate use.
Theodore M. Brown writes in his The Work of G. Rietveld Architect, “Economically Rietveld wanted to design furniture that could be cheaply mass-produced in a factory, thus making it available to everybody, ‘including the man that produced it’. The parts and construction, therefore, are standardized and are the most elementary nature possible. From a social point of view he wanted, by the use of machines, to relieve the tedium of the man who produced furniture. As a craftsman, Rietveld knew that satisfaction was derived from the production of one or two hand-built pieces. The compulsion of modern life had forced the craftsman, in Holland at any rate, to produce multitudes of items by hand; and this was drudgery for him. Articles designed for machine production, in Rietveld’s view, would produce the same results without subjecting the craftsman to a stultifying routine.”
I too was interested in economy and mass production, but I was also interested in craftsmanship, art, and the idea that furniture could provide more than pure function. Like it or not, I’m the product of post-modern times, taught by faculty that were educated and trained as modernists. I was all for function, structure, and beauty, but I was also interested in the ironic play of styles, citation, mythology, skepticism towards a grand narrative Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the real.
I think moviemaker Jim Jarmusch summed it up pretty well in Moviemaker magazine, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.’”
Additionally, my interest in Rietveld included Rietveld’s “open forms,” most visible to me in his design for a sideboard, “Although it was meant as a sideboard, its form is open and could even be enlarged into an almost infinitely repeated structure which would automatically place it in an entirely unforeseeable spatial relationship.” (Daniel Baroni, The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Barron’s, Woodbury, New York, 1978, p.46)
June 24, 1991, I co-purchased a brick two-flat in Chicago’s North-Center neighborhood. Our brick two-flat included a basement. I appropriated a portion of the basement as a wood-shop/workshop which allowed me to finally move my furniture making operations out of my parent’s garage. The more I learned about woodworking, the more I learned which aspects of woodworking I preferred to perform with hand-tools and which operations benefitted from machines like a jointer, planer, table saw, and drill press, all of which I acquired and put to immediate use.
Theodore M. Brown writes in his The Work of G. Rietveld Architect, “Economically Rietveld wanted to design furniture that could be cheaply mass-produced in a factory, thus making it available to everybody, ‘including the man that produced it’. The parts and construction, therefore, are standardized and are the most elementary nature possible. From a social point of view he wanted, by the use of machines, to relieve the tedium of the man who produced furniture. As a craftsman, Rietveld knew that satisfaction was derived from the production of one or two hand-built pieces. The compulsion of modern life had forced the craftsman, in Holland at any rate, to produce multitudes of items by hand; and this was drudgery for him. Articles designed for machine production, in Rietveld’s view, would produce the same results without subjecting the craftsman to a stultifying routine.”
I too was interested in economy and mass production, but I was also interested in craftsmanship, art, and the idea that furniture could provide more than pure function. Like it or not, I’m the product of post-modern times, taught by faculty that were educated and trained as modernists. I was all for function, structure, and beauty, but I was also interested in the ironic play of styles, citation, mythology, skepticism towards a grand narrative Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the real.
I think moviemaker Jim Jarmusch summed it up pretty well in Moviemaker magazine, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.’”
Unfortunately, I’m not able to find any of the sketchbooks and/or notebooks that I was keeping at the time this table was designed and fabricated. I only have one drawing which is a drafted drawing of my table design more or less in the form that it took once fabricated. I do remember that at that time my head was exploding with influences which led to inspiration, which led to a need to move all of the ideas in my head to my hands both in drawn form and in the process of making.
While studying architecture during my junior year abroad, I became aware of an architect named Carlo Scarpa. During one of our travel and study breaks, I made my way through the towns of Verona, Vicenza, Venice, and Bologna tracking down as many Carlo Scarpa projects as I had time to find. The most difficult project to track down was Scarpa’s cemetery for the Brion family in San Vito d’Altivole.
Whereas much of the work of European modernist and rationalist architects was stripped down, minimal, and abstract, the Brion Cemetery combined a modern aesthetic and language with an inner depth, dreams, nostalgia, and an authentic sense of place. It was this inner depth, dreams, nostalgia, and place that fascinated me the most and would bring me back two additional times during the many years that have passed since 1985.
"I would like to explain the Tomba Brion...I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry....The place for the dead is a garden....I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes." Carlo Scarpa. "Can Architecture Be Poetry"
The entrance to Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery includes two intertwined circles cast in concrete and outlined in iridescent pink and blue Murano glass, intertwined circles I believed represented the masculine and the feminine, life and death, the fidelity and love between husband and wife, buildings and landscapes, the public and private aspects of contemplating life and death, and the list went on.
Scarpa’s intertwined circles reference a vesica piscis, a mathematical shape formed by the intersection of two disks with the same radius, intersecting in such a way that the center of each disk lies on the perimeter of the other. In Latin, "vesica piscis" means "bladder of a fish", reflecting the shape's resemblance to the conjoined dual air bladders found in most fish. In Italian, the shape's name is mandorla ("almond"). This vesica piscis appears in the first proposition of Euclid's Elements, where it forms the first step in constructing an equilateral triangle using a compass and straightedge.
The vesica piscis was for me a search for mathematical and/or computational beauty. Function and structure in architecture and design could be calculated and measured, but beauty in architecture and design appeared to be more of a feeling, an instinct, a gift. Math and geometry were a way to rationalize or make beauty objective rather than subjective. Math and geometry would lead me (and many other architects and designers) to the golden rectangle, the golden spiral, the Fibonacci series, symmetry, mathematical proportions, and numerous other synthetic attempts at systematizing or measuring beauty.
Whereas much of the work of European modernist and rationalist architects was stripped down, minimal, and abstract, the Brion Cemetery combined a modern aesthetic and language with an inner depth, dreams, nostalgia, and an authentic sense of place. It was this inner depth, dreams, nostalgia, and place that fascinated me the most and would bring me back two additional times during the many years that have passed since 1985.
"I would like to explain the Tomba Brion...I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry....The place for the dead is a garden....I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes." Carlo Scarpa. "Can Architecture Be Poetry"
The entrance to Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery includes two intertwined circles cast in concrete and outlined in iridescent pink and blue Murano glass, intertwined circles I believed represented the masculine and the feminine, life and death, the fidelity and love between husband and wife, buildings and landscapes, the public and private aspects of contemplating life and death, and the list went on.
Scarpa’s intertwined circles reference a vesica piscis, a mathematical shape formed by the intersection of two disks with the same radius, intersecting in such a way that the center of each disk lies on the perimeter of the other. In Latin, "vesica piscis" means "bladder of a fish", reflecting the shape's resemblance to the conjoined dual air bladders found in most fish. In Italian, the shape's name is mandorla ("almond"). This vesica piscis appears in the first proposition of Euclid's Elements, where it forms the first step in constructing an equilateral triangle using a compass and straightedge.
The vesica piscis was for me a search for mathematical and/or computational beauty. Function and structure in architecture and design could be calculated and measured, but beauty in architecture and design appeared to be more of a feeling, an instinct, a gift. Math and geometry were a way to rationalize or make beauty objective rather than subjective. Math and geometry would lead me (and many other architects and designers) to the golden rectangle, the golden spiral, the Fibonacci series, symmetry, mathematical proportions, and numerous other synthetic attempts at systematizing or measuring beauty.
Rare is the architect that doesn’t encounter the golden rectangle, golden spiral, and/or Fibonacci series as part of their architectural education. I’d never had the chance to work with the golden rectangle outside of school projects, so I decided this table would be an attempt at proving or disproving the golden rectangle’s ability to predict beauty. The equation for the golden ratio is (phi = 1+ square root of 5 divided by 2) which results in an irrational number often shortened to 1.618. This should have been my first tip-off that the golden ratio was/is not a woodworker’s best friend. If the taller of my table’s two tops was intended to be 24-3/4” then my table needed to be 40.0455…” wide which is easy enough to construct using a pencil, compass, and straightedge, but not so easy to build when your tape measure’s smallest unit of measure is 1/16th of an inch.
Additionally, my table design was intended to have drawers and these drawers were intended to store audio cd’s which of course have a particular dimensioning system all their own. Custom round glass tabletops proved prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, I discovered that Crate & Barrel sold replacement glass tops for one of their then current coffee tables and the price for Crate & Barrel glass tops was affordable. So my golden rectangle coffee table began its computational or mathematical attempt at beauty with the dimensions of Crate & Barrel glass tops which were 21 ¾” in diameter and ½” thick.
Additionally, my table design was intended to have drawers and these drawers were intended to store audio cd’s which of course have a particular dimensioning system all their own. Custom round glass tabletops proved prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, I discovered that Crate & Barrel sold replacement glass tops for one of their then current coffee tables and the price for Crate & Barrel glass tops was affordable. So my golden rectangle coffee table began its computational or mathematical attempt at beauty with the dimensions of Crate & Barrel glass tops which were 21 ¾” in diameter and ½” thick.
At the same time that I was investigating the economies and benefits of machines in my making, and the objective beauty of mathematics in my design thinking, I was reading the writings of David Pye, an architect, industrial designer, and craftsman who had written about two design project paths: projects without risk, and projects at risk.
“If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘The workmanship of risk’: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.” David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship
“With the workmanship of risk we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its pure state in full automation. In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single sale-able thing is made. In less developed forms of it the result of each operation done during production is predetermined.” David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship
Whereas the mathematical precision of my tablesaw cut sticks adhered to the golden rectangle’s mathematical proportions, and the drawer boxes combined the mathematical proportions of golden rectangles with the dimensions of music CD jewel boxes, the hand carved walnut drawer fronts of my table were all about risk, dexterity, and an anti-repetition/mass-production aesthetic that I wanted to include as a way of making each table simultaneously the same and unique.
“If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘The workmanship of risk’: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.” David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship
“With the workmanship of risk we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its pure state in full automation. In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single sale-able thing is made. In less developed forms of it the result of each operation done during production is predetermined.” David Pye,The Nature and Art of Workmanship
Whereas the mathematical precision of my tablesaw cut sticks adhered to the golden rectangle’s mathematical proportions, and the drawer boxes combined the mathematical proportions of golden rectangles with the dimensions of music CD jewel boxes, the hand carved walnut drawer fronts of my table were all about risk, dexterity, and an anti-repetition/mass-production aesthetic that I wanted to include as a way of making each table simultaneously the same and unique.
The 1989 Beastie Boy’s Paul’s Boutique album sampled 105 songs. I’m pretty sure my Golden Rectangle Vesica Piscis Coffee Table sampled the work of more than 105 architects, designers, writers, musicians, and makers. I attempted to stuff so many influences and experiments into a single project and table that I’m surprised it didn’t and doesn’t collapse under the weight of all that intellectual baggage.
In retrospect, it’s not a great coffee table. The horizontal surface area of its many 1x1 poplar structural elements are dust collectors requiring the occasional Q-Tip to properly clean. Sanding, finishing, and recently refinishing the tables poplar and walnut wood surfaces and components has resulted in many a bloodied knuckle and require an effort beyond a labor of love.
I’ll never design nor make another table like my Golden Rectangle Vesica Piscis Coffee Table, but I’m glad I made it as it would go on to inform all of my many architecture and functional object design/make projects that followed in the wake of its influence.
I’ll never design nor make another table like my Golden Rectangle Vesica Piscis Coffee Table, but I’m glad I made it as it would go on to inform all of my many architecture and functional object design/make projects that followed in the wake of its influence.