He Lost a Month of Chair Design, Then Built It Anyway

The school's 2015-16 yearbook profiled one student in its shops section. He had built model race cars with his father as a kid. As a sophomore he took a class called Rethinking Furniture, and in it he designed a lounge chair inspired by Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome.

He worked on the design for a month in SketchUp. Then his computer crashed, and he lost all of it.

A month of drawing, gone. I have lost an hour of tax forms that way and still bring it up.

The yearbook moves straight on. Once the metal came in, he cut the pieces on the CNC plasma cutter, and then bent each one by hand. The photograph shows the finished chair: faceted, all triangles, with the dome plainly in it.

That was the first semester. In the second he built a full-suspension wagon, because, he said, he thought it would be useful at home and an interesting challenge. Later he built outdoor signs for a middle school and a cabinet and portable whiteboard for a local Islamic center, in a course that makes things for under-funded schools and nonprofits. "To me," he told the yearbook, "nothing is more fascinating than the act of creating something from scratch."

Years later, as an adult, he posted the list himself: the geodesic dome lounge chair, the all-terrain wagon, a camera gimbal, wooden bowls, a jewelry box inspired by Japanese joinery. Another alumnus replied that the lamp he soldered freshman year still works.

The lamp still works. That is the line I would put on the brochure.

Last month the middle one assembled a bookshelf for his room, from a flat box, on his own. It took him three hours. Halfway through he discovered he had put the back panel on backwards and had to take apart everything he'd done. I waited for the explosion. There was a long silence from his room. Then the sound of the screwdriver, starting again.

The bookshelf leans slightly to the left. He says this is a design choice. It holds every book he owns, and he has not let me fix it.