What is Rural Studio’s Woodshop class?
Woodshop class is a required course for all 3rd-year Rural Studio students taught by our own woodworking wiz, Steve Long. It is intended to be an active studio-based approach to learning woodworking. It also is contrasting in scale to their studio class, designing a house. Although the Woodshop is a resource for the entire Rural Studio community, 3rd-year students are the primary users. For most students, this class is their first experience using power and hand tools, let alone diving into fine woodworking.
Rural Studio believes that only basic tools are needed to create beautiful things, so we challenge students to create replicas of iconic wooden chairs using the tools at hand. By researching and replicating an existing design, students learn how a chair is put together and come to understand the process of woodworking. Students spend half the semester researching and planning the design of their chosen chairs, and then the second half constructing them. This series of blog posts will explain the students’ chair-making process, the history of these iconic chairs, and the unique skills and experiences this class offers to Rural Studio students.
Students are prompted to study, document, challenge, and mimic the chairs. To start, this requires students to learn the history and context behind the chair’s design and understand how it influenced the designers. The research is both contextual and physical. The students explore how the chair sits within the context of the designer’s architectural intensions and the period in which it was stylistically developed. From a physical point of view, they research materiality, dimensions, and details of the chair. A lot of decisions made are based on educated guesses. Sometimes, students build an argument about how the builder may have practically constructed the chair. Often, this is not obvious.
While students pursue their research, they are also getting lessons in basic woodworking and becoming acquainted with the shop. They are introduced to a broad spectrum of skills and techniques: safe and competent use of the equipment, wood joinery details (such as how to create a mortise and tenon), and the process for converting wood from rough to furniture-grade lumber. This involves understanding the basic characteristics of wood and the traits to work with. Students’ first step is to design and make a cutting board. This project offers the opportunity to use the equipment and (conveniently) involves many of the techniques used in building a chair.
The Frei Egídio Chair (aka the Folding Chair)
The Frei Egídio Chair, also known as the Folding Chair, was designed in 1987 by Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian modernist architect and furniture designer who immigrated to Brazil prior to WWII. The Frei Egídio Chair was specially designed for the Theater Gregório de Mattos in Salvador, an innovative space where the audience stood or sat on scaffolding and peered down at a ground floor stage that changed and moved. The chair provided seating that could be easily transported by audience members and then folded and stored when not in use. The folded chair occupies less than five percent of its unfolded volume, so its form is also key to its function.
Bardi’s innovative design was based on 15th century foldable Italian chairs known as curule seats as well as those used more locally by monks in Brazilian monasteries. (The name, Frei Egídio Chair, is a reference to Brother Egídio, a Brazilian monk.) Although the chair was originally handcrafted using simple woodworking tools, its minimalist design—featuring just three rows of wood joined with steel bushings and threaded rods—was intended to be produced on an industrial scale. The simple, reproducible chair was intended to serve the space it occupies—and the people who use it—through its lightweight, foldable design.
Q&A with Steve Long
How many Frei Egídio Chairs have been built over the years since Woodshop class started? We started doing this in 2015 and 16 iterations have been made. Sometimes multiple teams in the semester have the same chair.
Which type of wood do you use? Do you prefer one type over another? The original material was Brazilian pine. But we often have to substitute materials due to availability. I believe we have always used white oak in the class.
Any particular challenges in building this chair? Students can find only limited information on the chair’s details/joinery methods (little research has been published), so best educated guesses must be made. Given that this chair is supposed to fold flat, the most difficult challenge for the students is determining the exact geometry of angles and the placement of the threaded rods that tie the chair together. If they are slightly off, the chair will not fold properly. This is usually the hardest aspect of the project for the team. Lots of mockups too—trial and error!
What is the students’ favorite aspect of building this chair? Probably the satisfaction of identifying the exact alignment of the pivoting rods.
Any takeaways? Like a proud parent moment? Is there anything notable about a particular team that has built this one? Best one ever made by students? The most credit should go to the first team that built this chair in proving that it can be done. What makes this chair dynamic and different than the others is that it moves. Creating something that moves is never easy. Proud parent moments would be in the fact that the chair can sustain human weight and not collapse! We have never had a complete failure. The thing that makes me most proud in choosing this chair as a challenge is the simple craft and precision the students have been able to achieve. Given that it’s a conglomeration of many parts and that it moves, it is not easy to construct in a clean way. I have to believe the end product of these chairs is better quality than the originals.
Stay tuned for the next Woodshop class feature: the Zig Zag chair!