French philosopher Albert Camus, found within the shrug guy section, posits that the search for meaning can corrupt one’s chance at meaningful happiness. It is inherent to the human condition to seek this meaning within the universe however, only through an ongoing acceptance of absurdity can one find purpose and meaning and thus attain joy. For Camus, this vision of happiness can be described by imagining Sisyphus, doomed to forever roll his precious rock up a mountain, to be actually enjoying this absurd task. While I may not roll a rock up a mountain, I do continuously, almost feverishly sketch chair designs. Relegated to the margins of my notebooks, the crumpled napkins on flights, and sometimes even the surfaces of the desks on which I work, half-baked elevations of chairs can be found. I cannot stop doing this and only after reading Camus did I realize that the designs are all pretty similar. For weirdo 006b , the endless design I keep working out has finally been made. It is a Windsor chair, more specifically an American Windsor, my favourite and astonishingly difficult to make. The difficulty lies in the legs, which are turned by hand using a lathe. The tenons at the pinnacle of the leg, which are accepted by the seat, are conical and must be made exactly
the same angle and width as the others, as any difference in dimension will result in a leg too far up or too far down in the seat, compromising the structural integrity of the whole. For reasons unknown to myself now, I decided that at no point would I use a measuring device of any kind throughout the construction of a chair that requires almost surgical precision. It is clear to me now that I am a fool. Eyeballing everything, I attempted to match the angles and proportions of all four of the legs as best I could. The first leg is by far the easiest, but each subsequent leg leads to minor deviations which can completely derail the success of a chair. By the fourth leg, the pressure amounts to metric tonnes. Miraculously, they fit into the seat fairly well. The backrest spindles were constructed similarly to weirdo 003 and a router table. Emboldened by my success with the legs, my choice of drill bit versus the spindle diameter was about 1mm off resulting in some looseness. While the absurdity of designing and building a chair without a measuring device is certainly absurd, to really send it home all the effort and stress was for a chair that can’t be used because it is without a seat.
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Harrison Lane
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