Project Sideboard I
“Cause we are living in a material world,
and I am a material girl”
Because I do not fear coming across as a walking stereotype I have taken the freedom to start by quoting Madonna. This is fitting because the beginning of this blog is also its deepest chapter, and we will be moving into more mundane lands as we walk away from the 'drawing board'.
I remember first discussing this issue with my high school English teacher weeks before moving to University. We kind of reached an agreement, that there were two sorts of people or, rather, personalities, ways of thinking: the word driven and the image driven. He argued that he thought mostly using words for these enabled him to codify feelings and concepts whereas I think mostly in images which enable me to render spaces, structures form and materiality. Being one of the latter it seemed appropriate at the time for me to become an architect rather than a writer... if it weren't that Architecture is a business that functions at pre-climate change glacial speeds - but what did naive AF 18 year old me know... I just wanted to pull my shit together and maybe, if possible, get laid in the process.
It is therefore frustrating for an image / material thinker to work in architecture and spend years designing buildings that you (or as a matter of fact no one) will ever see built. On the very day I write this words, my director at the architectural practice I work announced the completion next year of a project the company started working on when I was six. Frustration doesn't quite describe it. This fact becomes even more alienating when you have have actually tried building something at University - the thrill of getting actual manufactured bits of material together is the best of highs. It focuses your mind, distorting any notion of the passing of time and can even manifest in physical orgasm but 100 times more subtle and lasting for 100 times longer.
Well over three years after leaving Graduate School and with little sign of any of my projects getting beyond .pdf binders I decided to take action, end the awful withdrawal and get on seeking the maker's high. I would design and make myself something I needed and. I'd become a man of the fourth industrial revolution and master an army of robots building stuff for me. I was in need of a sideboard to put my HiFi and crockery - it was a no-brainer. I would make it myself.
I'm a sucker for 1950s Scandinavian design: those wooden cabinets and armchairs reeking of social democracy. In the whole 'catalogue' my favourite is the low and long sideboard : wooden legs, sliding doors and maybe some drawers. Vintage Bang & Olufsen record player on top - fuck I could cum right now. Not even sorry.
The design was rather straightforward. I had a 2m gap to fill, leaving some access space to access a niche in the wall on the right hand side occupied by a bendy billy bookcase. I could afford a total of 1.600m in length, which I divided into two modules of 600mm plus a 400mm module. So that the two main modules are perfectly square I chose 600mm for the heigh of the body of the sideboard. As I wanted the module on the right to hold my vinyl record collection, I divided it into a 400x400mm shelf which generously fits records (record sleeves are 310x315mm). The smaller shelf on top will house my WiFi router.
Another fetish of mine is plywood. For the outsiders, plywood is a laminate material presented in boards of varying thicknesses. The boards are made of thin layers of timber glued together. The external layers are often a veneer of a nicer wood than the core layers. The timber is layered so that the direction of the fibres in the different layers is perpendicular thus strengthening the material. Plywood appeals to me as a material because it is a hybrid between natural timber and a synthetic material. It has just enough manufacture inside to bring up the poetics of craftmanship and engineering whilst the veneers celebrate the natural beauty of wood textures. The juxtaposition of these natural textures with the man made layered pattern of its section is the feature I find most stimulating.
Plywood has a great advantage: it is a very homogeneous material compared to natural timbers. Knots are removed from the layers before manufacturing plywood and wood from different batches and trees go into the different layers of the same board, thus evening out the variation in texture and hardness of natural wood. This quality makes plywood ideal for CNC (Computer Numeric Control) cutting and machining, technique that I am intending to use because I have no actual carpenter skills.
