Material

White Oak, Linseed Oil

Dimensions

28 in (Width) x 60 in (Length) x 36 in (Height)

Description

In 2020, the custom furniture startup I co-founded was accepted to compete in the College New Venture Challenge (CNVC), a startup accelerator program hosted by the Polsky Center at the Booth School of Business. As part of the competition, we were encouraged to find advisors, one of whom hired me the next year to work at his furniture company in Chicago.

I was brought on to help 57th Street Design jump tracks from building furniture to building cross-laminated timber (CLT) affordable housing. There ended up being a single week when my boss was on vacation, where I was allowed to start the first draft of a parametric CLT building model and I finished it. To see how that would later lead to my Minimum Rectangular Partitioning model, you can read the description here. This is a picture of me walking on the half-scale prototype for the building’s cassette system which I built:

Otherwise, for the overwhelming majority of the time I worked at 57th Street, I did manual labor on the shop floor. I did the crosscutting, straight-lining, panel glue-ups and planing for every piece of furniture. I also did all the dovetail joinery for the pieces that required it.

Given that somewhat frustrating context, I wanted to build something unlike the straight-edge mid-century modern furniture that 57th Street churned out. Steam-bending was a new technique I wanted to incorporate but I didn’t have the proper setup. For the finished piece pictured above, I ended up ripping half-inch strips that I steam-bent and laminated in threes to make the five rockers. I used an electric tea kettle and garbage bags to bend the rockers and trap the steam. Ironically, that creative outlet was what kept me from blowing my own top.