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Michael McDonough's laminated bamboo tables and chairs, (Courtesy Michael McDonough) |
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| Designer Michael McDonough keeps finding new ways to use the grass
that is stronger than steel. by Andrea Moed Ask Michael McDonough what it means for designers to think globally, and he will likely point to a cast-glass chair he designed in 1991, which was to be made with waste glass discarded from American factories and recast by artisans in Mexico. Ask him how he defines "green" building materials, and he will refer to the atrium he recently designed for the Sheraton Rittenhouse Square Hotel in Philadelphia, a space that combines live bamboo plants, bamboo flooring and furniture, and tiles made, improbably, of soybeans and recycled paper. As an architect and a designer of furniture, interiors, flatware, and jewelry--"from the spoon to the city," as he likes to say, quoting Adolph Loos--McDonough makes objects and spaces that address big questions about design and the environment. McDonough revisits the questions and answers of his career as he leads me around his Soho studio, showing off some of his most distinctive furniture designs. He describes each piece as the product of an "aesthetic investigation," a thought- and labor-intensive process in which history, material culture, economics, and politics become an informing context for the design. He begins by learning everything he can about the material he wants to work with: where it is grown and harvested, how it is processed, how various cultures have used it, and what forms they have made with it. Then, he works with the material himself, examining its structural properties in search of new ways to shape and use it. It was an investigation of recycled glass that led him to create the cast-glass chair, in collaboration with glass artist Tina Aufiero. McDonough attributes his longtime devotion to hands-on inquiry and investigation to his formative involvement with the environmental art movement in the Seventies, when he briefly made large-scale art before becoming an architect. "There was a politics of art and architecture [at that time]. It was thought of not just as an exercise in creating tasteful spaces, but as a way of experimenting or examining the possibility of working with political, moral, spiritual, and psychological content." More recently, McDonough's design process has also been informed by the culture of engineering. As he concentrates more on adapting materials and pushing them beyond their traditional uses, he finds himself thinking of research and development departments like Lockheed Martin's "skunk works" as models of practical innovation. It was a combination of social consciousness and technological and aesthetic curiosity that led McDonough to begin working with bamboo, the material that has been an important component of his most recent experiments. Bamboo appeals to several of his inclinations, since it is light enough to be made into furniture and strong enough to be used in architecture. It is also a renewable material whose cultivation can help control erosion, clean the air, and provide income to impoverished populations. McDonough's first bamboo products, a table and chair, are manufactured by Summit Design Studio and were introduced last year at Interplan, the annual contract furniture trade show in New York City. The chair is sleekly modern looking, with arms like hyphens jutting forward atop curving front legs. In its spareness, it resembles metal furniture. "Bamboo is stronger than steel in tension," McDonough says. "So I thought the best thing to do was just use it like steel." The chair's "exploded" back legs are its most striking feature, a shape that is echoed in the base of the table. With their horizontal slats, the legs suggest an arc or a bridge--a fitting allusion for a material that is used in Asia as scaffolding on construction sites. The bell shape of the legs is inspired by the unusual "tortoise" growth pattern that appears in some bamboo species, and the laminated surface of the table shows off the bamboo's naturally variegated color. Both pieces are a kind of bamboo demonstration, but in a shapely, sculptural mode. Among all of McDonough's material "investigations," these may be the objects with the broadest commercial appeal. McDonough first became aware of bamboo's potential three years ago, through his acquaintance with Linda Garland, an interior designer who heads the Environmental Bamboo Foundation in Bali. In 1995, he attended the EBF's annual International Bamboo Conference, where he met a community of "bamboo luminaries"--scientists, politicians, and other designers from around the world who are dedicated to promoting the use of bamboo. McDonough learned that for all its useful structural properties, the plant is more often viewed as a weed than as a valuable raw material. Known as the poor man's lumber, it grows on six continents, "in everybody's backyard." What's more, bamboo is often least valued in areas of the Southern Hemisphere where its cultivation could do the most economic and environmental good. McDonough continued his research with visits to bamboo growers and users worldwide. "I went to the leading bamboo nursery in Europe, the Bambouseraie, near Nîmes, France. I interviewed Charlotte Perriand, who had designed bamboo furniture in the late 1930s. I ate bamboo cuisine in Taiwan, checked out bamboo musical instruments in New York," he says. "Then, working with a craftsman in Miami, I had several 'alpha' furniture models made." As McDonough worked, he considered not only the forms he could make from bamboo, but the argument he would make for bamboo through these forms. "One of my goals was to sort of make this material an object of desire, to revalue it as a sophisticated material, and to reexport it back to the Southern Hemisphere, or back to the cultures where it's not valued." By reclaiming and innovating ways to manipulate bamboo, he hoped to position it in the context of the high-tech design that the developed world knows and understands. This is where the engineering aspect of his work came in: he needed to devise structures that would exploit bamboo's strengths. This is not an easy task, as McDonough found out when he studied two prototype cantilevered bamboo chairs that Alvar Aalto had designed in 1939, before World War II put an end to the project. McDon-ough discovered that there had been a structural problem with Aalto's design: Aalto had used traditional concealed mortise and tenon joints to connect the pieces of the chair, "as you would [do] if it were oak or maple or another deciduous wood," McDonough explains. "And they all cracked. Aalto was a master, and he knew wood, obviously. But bamboo is grass, not wood, and it has different properties." Drawing upon Asian joinery techniques, McDonough extended slats of laminated bamboo all the way through the frames of the table and chair. He continues to improve the design for future versions, "tweaking the bends and connections" and adding a second color choice. He has also developed several new chairs. Last fall, as the Summit pieces went into production, McDonough introduced both bamboo and materials research to a few members of the next generation of designers, in a studio course in the furniture department of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Like McDonough, department head Rosanne Somerson believes that innovation in design depends on the capacity to do long-term, open-ended research and development (see "The Master Class," May 1997). She would like manufacturers to look to RISD as a source of innovation--much the way technology companies look to places like MIT--rather than confine themselves to market-driven design. Having been approached by Garland and the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, Somerson thought that bamboo would be an ideal topic for the first research course. She enlisted McDonough to teach and help plan the studio. The course began much the way McDonough's research had, with discussions of bamboo's history and botany. He introduced the various bamboo materials available--including plyboo (a bamboo plywood) and bamboo veneer--and the tools traditionally used to cut and split the culms. But then McDonough let the students develop their own techniques, inviting them to build what they wanted and to treat the material any way they could think of. With only 10 weeks to work, the class attempted a multitude of construction methods. "We made ladders out of it, and structural elements to see how much weight could be put on it," reports student Gia Sung. "We mashed it up, we put it through wood chippers, sliced it into rings... we just went crazy." In the process, says her classmate Susanne Olsson, "we found out how far we could push the material." Olsson designed and built a bench whose base is an inverted arch of very thin plyboo; she was surprised to find that it could easily support the considerable weight of a large person. As a component of the course, McDonough requested that RISD integrate powerful, networked computers into the bamboo studio. "You couldn't work on bamboo without the computer," McDonough says flatly. He likes the added efficiency that software brings to prototyping, "but any good tool will do that," he adds. "For me, the real gift computing brought was... high-speed, global, instantaneous communication. I can talk to a guy in Jakarta and say, 'Look what I made with this Japanese saw.' " The students went online with other designers and with scientists. Some members of the class, including Olsson and Sung, were given the task of designing a prototype Web site to present the information they gleaned from their research; the site will eventually made public. In the future, it may serve as a repository for experts' field notes as well as a means of sharing the latest work in bamboo and of recognizing the best work through design competitions. It may also serve to redress the loss of "craft knowledge" and the facility with physical materials that is being jeopardized by the need to master new technologies. McDonough has a more expansive and optimistic view of the impact of computing on design. In a recent article in frogdesign's Rana magazine, he welcomes the age of "hyperinformation," advocating "a design theory linking computer culture and a global database." The bamboo project exemplifies this theory in action: In the course of learning about and working with bamboo, he and his students made Internet connections from Bali to France to Florida. Unlike some others in the sustainable design movement, McDonough is a dedicated globalist who finds long-distance, cross-cultural exchange and commerce indispensable. He insists upon seeing the world as a source of inspiration, information, and materials, one that designers are responsible to explore as well as to respect. "What I learned, from reading literature and from the political period in the Sixties, was that everything has meaning and content, and I learned to take responsibility for that content, and to make a conscious effort to go out and seek images and understand what they mean." But for all the intellectual rigor of McDonough's inquiries, his pursuit of the new and unfamiliar is above all an aesthetic choice. "For me, it's about beauty," he muses. "And the strategy that I'm conscious of is to make it beautiful. There's predictable, tasteful beauty, and there's kind of strange beauty. I happen to believe that most things that are truly beautiful... contain a lot of interesting contradictions. Beauty really is strange, and powerful, and that's why it lasts for centuries." Andrea Moed is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. |
Keywords:
Michael McDonough, bamboo, materials