Screenshot 2017-01-02 at 1.35.00 PM
2025
maple, black-dyed maple veneer, cotton tape
The Boeing Company is the fourth-largest defense contractor in the world. In 1962, Boeing established its first computer graphics department and became the first group outside academia to implement Computer Aided Design (CAD). Since then, CAD has been used to design both some of the most horrific and some of the most beloved objects we know. Weapons systems, bicycles, military aircraft, sewing machines, rockets, stereo amplifiers, surveillance satellites, and, of course, chairs. Trained as a mechanical engineer, I was called to consider the moral complexity of a tool I love and ask the question: what beauty is there to be found here?
The wireframe is a classic means of representing three-dimensional objects on the two-dimensional plane of a computer screen or piece of paper, and has existed as a drawing technique since the Italian Renaissance. A typical wireframe connects the ends and midpoints of an object’s bounding volumes with a network of lines and curves, easing the computational workload of displaying a complex model. Like CAD itself, the mathematical underpinning of wireframe modeling is fraught - the same node-and-edge graph theory also lies under the hood of social network mapping and algorithmic advertising. If you spend enough of your life looking at it, you develop a sense of what might make a “good” or “beautiful” wireframe - unbroken curves, clean intersections, tasteful line weights, a balance of the ornate and the minimal.
In search of a background on which to apply this texture, I looked to a society regarded as close to unambiguously good as possible. Founded on gender equality, pacifism, education, and high standards of craft, the Shakers built a reputation as some of the best chairmakers in the history of American furniture. The Shakers embraced technology, breaking ground in agriculture and manufacturing with pioneering advances in seed storage, saw blades, farm architecture, food storage, broom manufacturing, and, again, the chair. The typical Shaker chair is a post-and-rung ladderback chair, slightly varying in number of slats and rungs depending on the size, most often with a seat of woven cotton tape. At their peak in the mid-19th century, approximately 3,000 Shakers were living in 18 communities. On January 2, 2017 at 1:35pm, one of the few remaining Shakers, Sister Frances Carr, passed away. At the time of her death, only two surviving Shakers remained.
In Screenshot 2017-01-02 at 1.35.00 PM, a combination of wireframe ornamentation and Shaker construction transforms the chair into the digital representation of itself. The chair is constructed entirely of solid maple and dyed-black maple veneer, using the traditional decorative techniques of string inlay and lamination to create the wireframe effect. The seat, woven with the customary cotton tape, calls back to the transparent background of a PNG image, or the missing texture of a rendering. The intent is to show reverence through reference in form and ornament. With this treatment, the chair transcends both the screen and the physical world, becoming as much an image as a chair.