Adirondack Life, Inc. - July/August 2008: Out of the Bark

chair

by nils luderowski and jay dawson

When Ann Stillman O’Leary, a Lake Placid interior designer, traveled the country viewing contemporary rustic homes for her latest book, Rustic Revisited, she noticed that there was little suitably forward-thinking furniture available to outfit them. “The architecture had gotten ahead of the furnishings,” she said. She saw a similar penchant for the tried and true when she served for several years on the Adirondack Museum’s rustic fair committee. Although the artisans at the annual furniture expo in Blue Mountain Lake were creative and finely skilled at their craft, O’Leary “kept wondering when someone was going to do something a little bit out of the box—really stepping into this millennium.” In hopes of nurturing such a breakthrough, she approached the museum in 2006 with the idea for the “Rustic Tomorrow” project: to pair big-name modernist and post-modernist architects with some of the Adirondacks’ best rustic furniture makers. She lined up design luminaries including Michael Graves, a household name with his own Target product line, and David Childs, the architect for the Freedom Tower—the skyscraper that will replace the fallen twin towers at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan—and a longtime Keene seasonal resident. She also recruited others in the forefronts of their fields, if not the public’s consciousness, like architects Dennis Wedlick and Allan Shope and film art director Thomas Cardone. O’Leary added one Adirondack-based architect to the roster, Nils Luderowski, who is already known for combining modern styles with elements of the Adirondack vernacular in his designs.

Each architect chose the artisan he would work with based on portfolios and was constrained only by size (for shipping) and use of native materials. The six resulting

Child’s desk

by David childs and wayne ignatuk

projects are now on view at the Adirondack Museum, in Blue Mountain Lake, before they tour several galleries around New York State. Eventually, these will be auctioned to benefit the museum. The show is an extension of the museum’s special exhibits of rustic furniture, past and present, which began last summer and continue through the end of the 2008 season.

The pieces in the new exhibit show a range of approaches to the problem of updating rustic design. Some of the hallmarks of traditional Adirondack-style furniture—most notably, twig mosaic and use of bark—are entirely absent or appear only in subtle accents. But, with the possible exception of an abstract sculpture by Michael Graves and Bolton Landing furniture maker Jason Henderson, all the pieces are recognizably rustic.

Graves is as famous for fanciful product designs like the Alessi-brand teakettles that gained cult popularity in the 1980s as for his architecture. Henderson, a 2004 graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology and, at 26, by far the youngest participant in the bunch, won “most original design” in the 2005 rustic fair. Their collaboration was bound to lead to something unexpected.

Graves interpreted “rustic” broadly. “There aren’t many people today working in wood,” he said. “Therefore, anything using the characteristics of wood is part of that tradition.”

Henderson said he was “on cloud nine” when he learned that Graves had chosen him as a collaborator. “One of the first questions Michael asked me was if I had a problem with doing something purely sculptural. It was liberating.” Graves sent Henderson a sketch, then gave him a miniature foam model when Henderson visited him at his Princeton, New Jersey, office.

The piece, Graves said, is an extension of his interest in the paintings of ruined buildings typical of the British Picturesque landscape tradition, a distant forebear of American

sculpture

by michael graves and jason henderson

rustic. The sculpture’s abstract wood shapes suggest rather than depict architectural forms and include a reference to twigs—two bundles of sticks held together with resin. Henderson bleached and stained the wood white to make the piece monochromatic and further emphasize the shapes. “It was a complete surprise to me,” Graves said, “but I like it because I think he’s avoided the caricature of anything that’s too woodsy. He’s used his own level of abstraction.”

The other collaborating pairs tweaked the conventions of rustic design without straying far beyond familiar boundaries. The marriage of straight edges and natural tree elements was a frequent approach by the designers, as in a table by Connecticut eco-architect Allan Shope and Catskills-based furniture maker Judd Weisberg, which combines a free-form wood slab top with square pillars.

David Childs, whose firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, designed a proposed Lake Placid branch of the Adirondack Museum that has been criticized by some as too modern, went a different direction in his collaboration with Jay furniture maker Wayne Ignatuk. Childs had previously commissioned Ignatuk to do work for his seasonal home in Keene. Although his usual medium is glass and steel, the architect reveled in the homier palette of burls and branches. The intricate desk he designed looks like the studious equivalent of a tree house: Its base is a pair of flitches—longitudinal slabs cut from a log, inverted so that its branches look like roots; the stool is made from a carved burl; and it has a little birdhouse on top,

table

by alLan shope and Judd weisberg

complete with a nest and “eggs” (Childs said they spent hours searching for three perfect egg-shape stones in Johns Brook). These little details—others include touch-activated LED lighting and secret compartments—add an element of “surprise and delight for a child,” Childs said. Ignatuk used pieces of red stained glass salvaged from the Church of the Nazarene, on the site where the Adirondack Museum branch is supposed to be built.

Keene architect Nils Luderowski worked with Saranac Lake craftsman Jay Dawson to give one of the icons of Adirondack furniture—the Westport chair and its plank-based relatives—an update. “The beauty of the Westport chair lies in its geometry,” Luderowski said. “They are extremely stable, and so simple and so beautiful and functional. It had been in the back of my mind for years to do something with it.”

The chair he and Dawson devised has four interlocking parts: A base hewn from cedar log, and a seat and back that are held in place by a tenon carved from a root. The back has an adjustable nape rest made from a birch log and rawhide straps, and a narrow vent down the middle, highlighted with red paint, that gives the chair a lighter, more contemporary appearance. The piece manages to look clean and modern without seeming austere or squelching the natural character of the wood. “It’s so elegant looking and practical,” Dawson said of the design.

display cabinet

by dennis wedlick and barney bellinger

“It was a perfect joining of the two of us.”

Thomas Cardone has worked as a film art director for Disney and 20th Century Fox (his latest project was the adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic Horton Hears a Who!) and is a boyhood friend of Northville artisan Bill Coffey. Cardone took inspiration from Coffey’s previous work with his partner, Russ Gleaves, to design a whimsical desk. Coffey and Gleaves frequently use root bases, which Cardone combined with futuristic-looking orbs and a desk lamp with a gooseneck arm that resembles a tree branch. Coffey and Gleaves, figuring they’d have a hard time finding an actual limb that curved the way they wanted, used a technique that Gleaves had developed earlier—he took three separate pieces of black walnut, then steam-bent and laminated them into shape, carving branchlike details to add realism. “It gives it a more contemporary, cleaner look,” Coffey said. “People sometimes think it’s an actual branch, so we pulled it off.”

Whimsy also figured into the piece by Dennis Wedlick, a New York City architect recently named to Architectural Digest’s AD 100, which showcases the top international interior designers and architects. His collaboration with Mayfield furniture artisan Barney Bellinger is a display cabinet that, in the words of Wedlick, “looks like it’s growing out of the floor.” Inspired in part by Bellinger’s occasional practice of salvaging an item of furniture from another style and incorporating it into a rustic piece, Wedlick’s initial idea was to base their project around an Ikea cabinet—a practice called “Ikea-hacking” popular with the do-it-yourself crowd. In the end, Bellinger constructed simple modern shelves, which are supported by a tangle of overturned sticks that look like roots and topped with a forest of antlers. “It’s a little like Chairy [the anthropomorphic chair from Pee-wee’s Playhouse],” Wedlick said.

Desk

by thomas cardone, russ gleaves and bill coffey

“It’s witty and a little bit irreverent.”

The design may be irreverent, though Bellinger is anything but when it comes to the topic of rustic craftsmanship. “Let’s remember why we’re here,” he said, echoing what he told guests at a reception for the collaborators in New York City in March. “I don’t think we have to take rustic and put it into a world, just because the world is changing. People are drawn to the camps because of the simplicity.” To him, the problem isn’t that rustic furniture makers are stuck in the past but that too many people, some with a questionable eye for design, are “jumping in the game, throwing some bark in” and calling their furniture rustic.

The goal, he said, shouldn’t be so much modernizing rustic as keeping it fresh. “Don’t be predictable. I guess that sums it up.”