Smoking out proportions…

Chest on Chest, Goddard school, Cleveland Museum of Art

Years ago I wrote an article (issue 186) for Fine Woodworking Magazine about documenting a piece of furniture in a museum. It actually was meant to help open doors with woodworkers at local historical centers and gain access to furniture that might otherwise be off limits. I did receive feedback from a curator at the Yale University Art Museum

praising my methods. Something interesting happened behind the scenes that never made it in print. The local historical center we used in the article was very strict about picture taking, touching, even breathing around their collection. During the camera shoot the caretaker let his cat loose since visiting hours were over. It was an overweight tabby that looked sort of like a seal with legs. Kitty proceeded to climb up on a chair back and circle the room. She strutted across the back of a settee, overtop a piano, and across a desk. Without letting her delicate claws touch the floor she finally came to rest on an upholstered chair that had a tape across it to keep galoots like me from using it. Obviously rules don’t apply to cats.

Now I actually approach exploring a furniture piece a little differently than I did then. Now I’m more interested in uncovering proportions than documenting every dimension. Today I might take a few views with a digital camera but instead of gathering a series of dimensions with a tape and tranfering them to a drawing, the information I’m after is collected on a story stick. I use a thin strip of poplar and make tick marks with a sharp pencil along the edge that align with elements on the piece. It’s quick accurate and best of all, the poplar story board is great for useing  dividers to smoke out the proportional scheme underneath a design. It allows  non-invasive exploratory surgery with sharp divider points while doing no harm to the patient.

I do this also with pictures of furniture. Instead of damaging the glossy pictures by walking all over it with dividers, I transfer the major boundaries on a paper story board and then use dividers to unlock the design. This is a great exercise to train your eye and help you to think proportionally.

George Walker

Proportioning furniture for a room…

Side table and mirror, John Linnell circa 1770

 

This time of year takes me back to some memories of delivering newspapers as a kid.  For a ten-year, old dragging heavy loads of papers in snow and slush was a sort of purgatory.  There were few bright spots except the season brought out a bit of Christmas spirit in otherwise grumpy customers. Old Mrs. Delany would invite me in for a cookie and a tip while her german shepard growled and cursed me from behind the couch. My glasses fogged up in the warm air and I’d fumble around with layers of mittens, scarves and hats. Mr. Kleptak an old guy (at that age I thought anyone over thirty was old) would be tanked up on the hard stuff and invite me in to look at his tree. It was artificial, and sprayed with some plastic cottony mixture made to look like snow. Now the snow was gray like it had picked up dirty highway spray. His tiny living room was crowded with this creepy tree and some big furniture pieces too tall for the cramped ceiling.  There was a tall case clock and a large chest on chest that had a chop job so they could stand upright. Looked like they had flat-top hair cuts only he had to clip part of their sculls also to make them fit.  I didn’t know anything about furniture at the time but even I knew the old guy was half a bubble off. He did tip well when he had a few whiskies in him.    

 In traditional architecture when designing a room interior, careful thought is given to proportioning large elements like doors, windows, and fireplaces as important parts of the overall composition. Doors and windows normally fill up large areas that affect the way we relate to the space in a room. This led me to question whether the same thought might apply to proportioning furniture built for a specific room. It might explain the design thought behind some pre-industrial furniture pieces. Why did the Goddard’s and Townsends of Newport build the towering nine shell secretaries up to 113” tall in an era when the average man was 5’7”? Could it be that the large piece was scaled to compliment a grand room? 

I ran across a drawing that makes me think that this was a design consideration at times. This drawing above is by John Linnell, a British artisan who worked as a carver, cabinetmaker, and furniture designer in the last half of the 18^th century. His drawings caught my eye because they actually include some background elements from the room setting the furniture was intended for. This is a rare thing to see in a drawing. Notice how the top of the mirror aligns with the door frames on either side. Note also that the tabletop lines up with the chair rail on the wall and the ornaments on the legs line up with the baseboard. It’s obvious this mirror and table were designed with this space in mind. 

I’m just tossing this out there as something to chew on. 

George Walker

Leg work…..

Doric Classic Order, Drawing by George Walker

I’ve been looking at a lot of pictures of furniture legs and how they are proportioned. One thing that comes to mind is that a lot of designs include some sort of taper. If you look at a classic order you will notice that the column reduces in diameter as it rises up to the capital. The lower third of the column remains a constant diameter and then begins to taper inward. Actually it curves in very gradually, the term for this is known as entasis. This reduction in diameter probably echoes the natural tapering in tree trunks first used in primitive construction. Usually the column is 1/6 smaller at the top than at the base. Furniture legs however, often taper in the opposite direction getting smaller towards the floor. This taper mimics nature also. Think about how your legs are proportioned.

Anatomy Sketch by Leonardo

Our limbs are thicker near our torso and taper down to our ankles. Straight legs are fine on a workbench,  but to my eye pull the life out of a chair or table design. I sat down and looked at the proportions behind  a number of period chairs, tables, sideboards, and one desk. They had quite a variety of heights but the proportions tended to fall into a fairly narrow window. I drew up this graphic to illustrate. It shows a table leg that tapers from the apron down to the floor. Which looks most pleasing to your eye?

Here’s how much each leg is actually reduced:

A – Straight

 B – Reduced by a sixth

C – Reduced by a fifth

D – Reduced by a fourth

E – Reduced by third

F – Reduced by half

G – Reduced by ¾

Here is what I found looking at actual examples. There was one example with straight legs and one with the reduced by 3/4. The straight leg looked dead and the stiletto leg actually looked structurally compromised. Most others actually fell into a narrow band. They reduced by 1/3, ½, or they were reduced slightly less than one half. By that I mean they were 2” at the top and 1&1/8” at bottom. This may be helpful to keep in mind when designing legs regardless whether they are turned or square in cross section. As always, take this knowledge and look at built work. File away in your mind what appeals to you as well as what doesn’t.

George Walker

Specifications and tolerances

  

I had the good fortune almost thirty five years ago to land an apprenticeship to become a machinist. It was the tail end of an era just before everything went digital and cnc. Apprentices spent the first two years doing all the heavy dirty jobs under the watchful eye of an older journeyman, many of them second generation Poles, Slovaks, Jews, or Italians. They’d watch me struggle with something new and finally saunter over and offer me some concoction on a cracker, usually involved a sardine, slice of onion, and some smelly cheese. After chasing it down with a slug of strong coffee the journeyman would show me a trick that was simple, fast, and always left wondering why I hadn’t thought of it.

A micrometer became an extension of my hand as I learned to quickly turn blocks of metal into precision machine parts. I can still rattle off the decimal equivalents to almost any fraction of an inch i.e. 3/16 equals .187”. Years later I worked in an area where we worked routinely with very tight tolerances. Everything measured in millionths of an inch. An operator might say, “it’s 20 heavy on the front,” meaning the parts were 20 millionths off taper.

It’s amazing to look at some of the old rulers that were often relied upon by pre-industrial artisans. Very crude, often homemade or perhaps by the local blacksmith. Many times the divisions only go down to eighths of an inch. Yet they produced furniture of amazing quality that required incredible precision and accuracy. They had two major differences in the way they worked. One is that although their rulers may have been crude, their cutting tools were capable of great precision. A nicely tuned handplane is capable of making controlled cuts beyond what any ruler can accurately measure. Parts weren’t made to specification; they were roughed in with axes and saws and then made to fit with planes, spokeshaves, or chisels. This made the ruler secondary as a part such as a drawer front would be fit to the opening rather than to a numeric dimension.  

An even bigger difference is that these workers were more focused on proportions than dimensions. They used their crude rulers to rough in the comfortable height for a tabletop but I’m convinced that the focus was largely on proportioning one element with another.

Specifications and tolerances have value when you need to mechanize and mass produce. Proportions stand apart when the need is to design something aesthetically appealing and works especially well in one off, custom work.

My micrometer doesn’t see much action anymore and the ruler less and less. Instead dividers and my eye guide the work at my bench.

George Walker

Not just plain vanilla…

Crown molding detail, Photo by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

Years ago we were painting a room and my wife sent me to the store to get a gallon of paint. She gave me a paint swatch and said, “Have them mix a can of eggshell white in semi-gloss.” Well I’m light years behind Barb when it comes to colors and though I’ve gotten better, at that time my pallet was limited to the dozen colors you find in a small crayon box. In usual fashion all I heard her saw was “white.” What could be difficult about grabbing a can of white paint? When I arrived back home with the wrong white it was one of those – Bad Dog! Bad Dog! moments. There are many flavors of white that can often make a marked difference.

Sometimes very simple things can be tweaked in a variety of ways to achieve different looks. Here’s an example. A cyma recta is a compound shape that’s often used in molding profiles. The easy way to recognize a cyma recta is that the ends of the curves flow into a more or less a horizontal axis. You can always tell it from a cyma reversa because its curves flow in a vertical axis. The cyma recta is often used to terminate a form. You often see it at the top of a crown molding. The concave curve at the top of the shape provides a shadow that helps your eye recognize the boundary. It can also be flipped upside down and used to visually translate weight and mass to the floor so is often used in base moldings on case pieces. In that situation it’s the convex portion of the curve that your eye perceives as being compressed under the weight and mass. A plain vanilla cyma recta can be altered in a variety of ways. The curves can be cut deeper or shallower. We are often accustomed to seeing shallow curves as much architectural stock moldings are made from thin material that requires a shallow profile.

Curves can be deeply cut or shallow

If you have the opportunity to see profiles that are deeper, the effect can be very dramatic. You can also proportion the curves in cyma recta so that you create a major and minor. By moving the intersections where the concave and convex connect you can emphasize either the concave portion or the convex. This is useful to know when you think about how at the top of a crown molding it’s the concave portion creating the shadow.

Emphasize either concave or convex portion

Conversely when a cyma recta is inverted and used at the bottom of a design, it’s the convex curve that communicates to your eye that the piece has weight and mass. I could go on and on. The curves can be based on ovals rather than circles to create some bold light and shadow contrast. The facial angle (the amount the molding is tilted) can be set steeper or shallower, not to mention that this molding profile can be embellished with carving. Hope this isn’t confusing or discouraging. Instead, make a note to begin looking at built examples on furniture and buildings. Look at the many ways that something as simple as a cyma recta can be pushed and pulled and how it affects your view. It may come across as weak, naked, or bold. It may compliment the design or fight with other elements. When you begin making those distinctions and start to understand why, you are on your way to begin making more solid design judgments even if they have nothing to do with moldings.

 George Walker

Practice training your eye

Years ago I thought cutting good tight dovetails with hand tools was something beyond my reach. My first few efforts were pitiful. In bowling terms I threw a lot of gutter balls. But something told me that I could do this or at least get better. Good tools made a difference, but I’ll be honest.  What really turned the corner for me was just cutting a lot of dovetails by hand. Not sure when it happened but after about a  two dozen tries they started to look respectable, after fifty they looked good and the whole process became second nature. Maybe I’m a slow learner but that’s the way it often works for me.

I also used to think that an eye for design was sort of magical, something you were born with or bestowed on you because you had good mojo. Well I still believe that there are people born with exceptional talents and gifts. But  if you take the time to study about gifted creative people you often find that they really work at it. They take this raw talent and through effort make it better.

I now believe by my own experience through trial and error that anyone with some effort can improve their eye or design sense. There are concrete exercises you can do to improve your ability to design and visualize. One very simple thing anyone can do is to take up sketching. I’m not talking about becoming an artist. True confession here, my drawings suck. Sometimes I go to a museum and I sit down and sketch furniture on display. Security folks come up to check on me and walk away snickering because it looks like something a labrador retriever had drawn.  Doesn’t phase me. That’s because, somewhere after the 12th or 20th drawing I started seeing things a different way. Sketching helps me see more when I look at a design and often I pick up on sublte details that would normally escape my grasp.

Something unique happens when you sketch. My own thought is that it requires you to flip a couple of  switches marked “focus” in your brain that are normally on the off position. Whatever the reason, I keep a notebook with me and sketch when I have a free moment.

Manor house at Quail Hollow

Sometimes I sketch buildings while waiting for my wife while she’s shopping. I sketched this house the other day.

My aweful 10 minute sketch

I’ve been looking at it for years but never realized how many dormers and angles are in the roofline. Make this a part of your design training. It need not take you away from your workbench. You can grab a few minutes of sketching on a lunch break. That is, if you can put up with an occasional snickering hyena.

Something familiar….

Fiddlehead, spring 2008

I appreciate the thoughtful comments offered up on this “Design Matters” blog. Several stand out that have helped me fill in some blanks and see things in a fresh way.  Jim Tolpin made this comment a couple of weeks ago that got my gears turning -

So back to the question: What makes for a beautiful piece of furniture…or architecture? Is there a universal “something about it” going on here? Does this “something” cross cultures, periods, styles, materials? Well for me, yes there is…and I believe it’s profoundly fundamental: For a built form to look beautiful there must be something inherently familiar about it. But not familiar in the sense that one has previously seen that particular form and/or style (i.e. you grow up around colonial furniture so therefore if it looks colonialesque then it automatically looks beautiful..or at least “right”). Instead, the familiarity is in the gut…in our DNA. It looks right because it just feels right. If you were to invite 10 people at random out of the phone book to take a look, then 8 or 9 out of 10 would agree…

This rings so true. For starters it’s why including nature in our designs has such an appeal. We have this built-in familiarity with nature that we automatically connect with. I’m reminded of something Andrea Palladio wrote in The Four Books of Architecture –

” I say therefore, that architecture, as well as all other arts, being an imitatrix of nature, can suffer nothing that either alienates or deviates from that which is agreeable to nature”

This concept of making a design work by incorporating the familiar may have many layers but I am most aware of three that I’m always exploring and trying to understand.

One is how we shadow some of the ways that nature responds to the forces acting upon it, gravity, wind, or water. Palladio speaks about this when discussing how the moldings used at the base of columns bulge out just like tree trunks being compressed  by the weight and mass bearing down on them. Nature often has flowing transitions from one part to another and many times moldings can be used to mirror those familiar transitions. Working curvature into a design links back to those familiar sights from the natural world.

Moldings on base imitate nature

Another layer is to display nature openly by using carving or marquetry to render a  flower,  bird, fish, or leaf.  Additionally, they often can add to a design in a powerful way if aranged so that they reinforce the underlying form that’s already there. An inlayed vine with leaves and flowers is more effective if it emphasizes the curves already existing in the part that it’s flowing across.

You can also have a carving or inlay set off by itself as a sort of puntcuation.

The final layer, and the one I think could be explored for a lifetime is bringing about familiarity by uniting a design with proportions. For much of western history there was thought to be a link between proportions and nature as seen in music and the ideal human form. The term “commensurable” crops up a lot when studying traditional design. The dictionary defines as: Able to be measured from a common standard, Properly proportioned, fitting… Much classical architectural work uses a module such as the diameter of a column as the common standard with everything linked back to that one module or root note. Or in the case of much pre-industrial furniture designs, forms are built around simple whole number ratios, with all parts linked together with simple proportions ie, 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 3:5, 4:5. I’ve touched earlier on how easy these proportions are to manipulate with dividers. Also, with a little practice they are easy to imprint in your mind. That makes them easy to visualize. But, there’s something more to these simple ratios that the ancients saw and that my gut tells me is true. They do strike a note inside of us, something familiar that we cannot explain.

George Walker

Proportions and big guns

Last week I’ve been reading Robertson’s “A Treatise of Mathematical Instruments”. It’s a reprint of an 18th century British work that includes some passages dealing with proportions. I ran across a few more nuggets that to me were interesting or at the least entertaining. Did you know that?

 “It has been found, that one man in a minute, can raise a Hogshead (large barrel) of water 12 feet high upon a mean: For a stout man, well plied with strong liquor, will raise a hogshead of water 15 feet high in a minute.”

It also is filled with mathematical solutions to real problems encountered in the day. How many spars of white fir do you need to lash together to construct a raft to float 100 barrels of gunpowder and four men (a total weight of 12,600 pounds) three inches clear of the water? It defines a spar as 12 inches by 12 inches by twenty foot long. A bit hard to imagine going to the lumber yard and asking to look at their 48/4 stock and needing twenty footers, 56 of them total.

What really piqued my interest was this engraving above of a naval cannon barrel from the plates in the back of the book. It caught my eye because if you look closely it has numerous moldings circling the barrel. One thing that stood out is that it has bands with small fillets and beads or astragals that actually define the major sections of the barrel. I always thought the bands on these old cannons were to give it strength (which the accompanying text agrees with) but they also act to mark the borders between the parts of the gun such as the muzzle and the mid sections known as the first and second reinforce. This struck me as interesting because in the traditional uses of moldings small beads and fillets are often used as a separator.

You often see a bead near the top of a column to signal your eye that it’s about to terminate in the capital. Up on the entablature you may see a fillet to separate the frieze from the architrave. We often see a bead scratched into the edge of period drawer fronts or beading applied to the perimeter of drawers to work visually in the same way. What intrigued me most in the whole book is the way that Robertson describes the specifications for naval cannons. He describes them proportionally in much the same way as a designer would describe how to lay out the parts of a classic order. The author uses the cannon ball diameter as a “module” and describes every part in proportion to that. All the lengths and diameters are in multiples or fractions of that module. This practice is used frequently in describing the parts of a classic order, everything down to the smallest detail expressed in relation to the diameter of the column at the base. Then the author matter of factly states

“But a small variation in the lengths of these parts, will not materially affect the Gun, either in strength, use, or pleasing proportion.”

Wow! Here’s an 18th century scientist describing the design of big honking naval guns, referring to Vitruvius (a 1st century Roman architect and writer) who wrote that a good design should be functional (use), sturdy (strength), and beautiful (pleasing proportion).

Actually when I pull back and look at that engraving, it does have nice lines.

George Walker

Moldings DVD finally complete!

Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design, by George Walker

I’m really excited that today the final version of my second design DVD – Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design: Moldings   is finally complete and should be ready for holiday deliveries. This was another team effort with the great folks up at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in Warren Maine. It was fun putting this together, and like my first video offers some insider views at some wonderful examples of architecture to bring the information to light. We even found and shot some fun things up in the attic of a 250-year-old courthouse on the Kennebec River. 

Photo courtesy Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

This information packed video will take the voodoo out of designing moldings and has something for just about anyone who builds furniture. For those of you who enjoy building period work, this video has many “aha” moments. It should connect the dots and fill in the gaps of what you may already know and be a great help. You’ll have renewed confidence to tackling design problems related to moldings and have a much greater appreciation for some of the masterful work you love to study. 

Molding detail courtesy Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

I’m also excited to see how this may inspire and empower designers who work on contemporary furniture. The DVD explores how moldings can emphasize a form and manipulate light and shadow in a design. It may just open up a whole new bundle of creative options for you. 

Moldings can be subtle yet powerful - Photo courtesy Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

 Finally, the information in this video can even help you make solid design decisions down at the lumberyard if you are installing moldings on a renovation or home improvement project. 

There are a couple of side effects you should be aware of before buying this DVD. It may result in neck pain from gawking up at public buildings to inspect the moldings. 

Wooster Ohio Courthouse

It may also result in an irresistible urge to finally buck up and get that set of hollows and rounds you’ve been dreaming about. Finally, it may result in a “creative itch flare up” that can only be soothed by more time at the workbench.    

Additional note: I just learned that Lie-Nielsen Toolworks will have this up on their website next Tuesday Dec 8th. You can also call and order a copy at (800.327.2520).

George Walker

Folding rules and proportions

A Treatise of Mathematical Instruments by John Robertson

Last fall at the WIA (Woodworking in America) conference in Valley Forge I had the chance to talk to Don McConnell and Larry Williams from Clark and Williams. Don and I have been exchanging e-mails for some time and he was excited to show me an antique ivory sector he had purchased. For those of you unfamiliar with a sector, it’s a precursor to a slide rule and was used in the 18th century for solving a wide array of math problems. It looks like a six inch folding rule and has a series of graduated scales radiating out from the center of the pivot where the two sides are joined together. Used in concert with a pair of dividers, it’s essentially an adjustable triangle that was used to solve geometry problems related to surveying, architecture, even naval navigation. What really piqued my interest is when Don introduced me to a book which describes the use of the sector – A Treatise of Mathematical Instruments by John Robertson. The book has a several sections on using a sector to manipulate proportions and how to utilize it to draw the classic orders. The sector has a pair of lines radiating from the pivot point called the “Line of Lines”. These lines are evenly divided into ten equal parts and are used to manipulate proportions. If you place compass points across any two identical increments on the line of lines, for example 9 and 9, the distance across the other increments will be proportional. Reset your compass across the 1 and 1 and it’s one ninth of the distance between the 9 and 9. This brings up several questions for me. Sectors were expensive scientific instruments most likely used by professional surveyors, scientists, etc. I’ve never seen one listed in a tool inventory from a cabinet maker. However, you can do these simple proportional exercises with a folding rule.

I was playing with an early 12” Stanley rule which had a set of inch scales on the inside faces that radiate right from the pivot point. I wonder if pre-industrial artisans commonly used a folding rule to transfer quick accurate proportional measurements? An example would be laying out the position of drawer hardware on a bank of drawer fronts. If you look at these closely they were seldom centered but usually offset. Let’s say you wanted to mark where to drill for the pulls and you wanted the holes to be 5/9 up from the bottom of each drawer. Simply pluck the drawer height from the opening in the case with a set of dividers. Adjust the folding rule until the points touch the rule 9” out from the center on both top and bottom scales. Reset the dividers to grab the distance 5” out from the center on your rule and you have the height you need. If you have a bank of graduated drawers all different heights you could use this to set all the hardware very quickly and with virtually no calculations and little chance of transferring the wrong measurement because they are pulled right from the case. Pretty slick.

George Walker