dearborn park 2 shelving
Late 1989 and/or early 1990, shortly after completing design and installation work on my parents Dearborn Park 2 Garden, my parents offered me a second commission.
Prior to moving from our South-East Side Chicago home of 25 years, my mother had packed smaller belongings into egg boxes picked up at the local Jewel. My parents requested shelving for at least 45 egg boxes, firewood, landscaping tools, miscellaneous hand-tools, and hardware. Oh, and of course the shelving needed to leave enough room for parking a car and getting in and out of the car once parked.
My then current design and designer obsessions included the Shakers, Donald Judd, and Gerrit Rietveld. I’d never been trained to design and make furniture, so I was also reading books about wood-working and woodworkers. I was especially interested in the work of The Stickley Brothers, George Nakashima, and James Krenov.
In Donald Judd Architektur, Donald Judd wrote “Of course if a person is at once making art and building furniture and architecture there will be similarities. The various interests in form will be consistent. If you like simple forms in art you will not make complicated ones in architecture. ‘Complicated,’ incidentally, is the opposite of ‘simple,’ not ‘complex,’ which both may be. But the difference between art and architecture is fundamental. Furniture and architecture can only be approached as such. Art cannot be imposed upon them. If their nature is seriously considered the art will occur, even art close to art itself.”
No doubt this was true for me as my interests and design inspirations were varied, but the overall aesthetic tended towards minimal, less is more, but with a sense of humor inspired by post-modern architects such as Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and their admonition that less is also a bore.
Prior to moving from our South-East Side Chicago home of 25 years, my mother had packed smaller belongings into egg boxes picked up at the local Jewel. My parents requested shelving for at least 45 egg boxes, firewood, landscaping tools, miscellaneous hand-tools, and hardware. Oh, and of course the shelving needed to leave enough room for parking a car and getting in and out of the car once parked.
My then current design and designer obsessions included the Shakers, Donald Judd, and Gerrit Rietveld. I’d never been trained to design and make furniture, so I was also reading books about wood-working and woodworkers. I was especially interested in the work of The Stickley Brothers, George Nakashima, and James Krenov.
In Donald Judd Architektur, Donald Judd wrote “Of course if a person is at once making art and building furniture and architecture there will be similarities. The various interests in form will be consistent. If you like simple forms in art you will not make complicated ones in architecture. ‘Complicated,’ incidentally, is the opposite of ‘simple,’ not ‘complex,’ which both may be. But the difference between art and architecture is fundamental. Furniture and architecture can only be approached as such. Art cannot be imposed upon them. If their nature is seriously considered the art will occur, even art close to art itself.”
No doubt this was true for me as my interests and design inspirations were varied, but the overall aesthetic tended towards minimal, less is more, but with a sense of humor inspired by post-modern architects such as Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and their admonition that less is also a bore.
Architects study and often use dimensioning systems based on the human body. The shelving system I was designing for my parents needed to take not only the human body into account, but also car dimensions, the unique proportioning system used to ship eggs, and off the shelf 1x and 2x lumber given that our project budget was as modest as the scale of my commission.
The egg box dimensions dominated the project start to finish. I felt like the egg boxes had a kind of pop-art quality that could be and should be celebrated in a manner similar to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. The shelving system is relatively quiet, humble, and takes a back seat to the true stars of the show…egg boxes.