Robotic fabrication | reuse wood | Oct 2018

Furniture series

Material studies in a series of oak furniture

In 2018, I created a series of oak furniture in collaboration with Asbjørn Bratsbjerg [DEN]. In the series were sets of table legs, benches, and stools in varying heights. They were all made from old reclaimed tabletops that we gathered in the local neighbourhood – some even dating back to 1921! The furniture was made by using both computational and analogue fabrication methods for what they are best for. This meant introducing numerically controlled machines (CNC) and exploiting its precision and speed for the detailed joinery and rough outlines. The pieces were then further processed, sanded, and assembled by hand. We started out by making 13 pieces and were going to sell them at the annual Christmas market (first weekend of December) at Aarhus architecture school – we were, however, sold out in 35 minutes…

The costumers really liked the story of the reused oak tables and our idea of filling the existing screw-hole with a mahogany peg, so it would stand out and communicate the story of where the wood came from.

We built with knowledge gained from our previous works with wood, but also quickly found that sourcing and stewarding these reclaimed pieces of lumber was a different challenge. One thing was the practical contact with the individual private sellers. They were rarely available at the same time and spread throughout the city. They were however very interested in the transformative design, and some even ended up giving us the tables for free. The second issue was ensuring the material quality, since a lot of the furniture ads were vague and unspecific. Wrong wood types, high internal moisture, slim material thickness and altered/hollowed out pieces were all parameters that we avoided buying. Luckily, after a while we were able to screen out most of the bad tabletops by asking questions and receiving supplementary images. In total we collected about 200kg of oak.