School portraits / School life · from the 2015–16 yearbook
Four Legs Would Have Done
Four legs would have done it. JD had a rounder idea.
Suppose you are making a chair and you want to be home for dinner. Four legs, a seat, a back anyone would recognize — that is a whole chair, and the evening is yours. I would have stopped there. Jean Daniel Le Roy, known as JD, did not. The 2015–16 Lick-Wilmerding yearbook remembers what he made instead in Rethinking Furniture his sophomore year: a geodesic dome lounge chair inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s dome.
He worked on the design for a month in SketchUp. Give a drawing that long and you start to trust it. You close it at night and expect it in the morning, which is a modest thing to ask of a file. Then the computer crashed, and all the data was lost.
A CNC plasma cutter cut the metal pieces. That sounds like the moment the machines take over. It was not. Each piece still had to be carefully bent by hand, one and then the next.
The yearbook photograph shows he finished it: a faceted lounge chair with the dome still readable in it. That leaves the rest of us, team four-legs-and-dinner, with an awkward question. Ours would have been done sooner. His is the one you would walk across the room to look at again.