Pull Up a Chair, Then Fix It | New York Times
WHAT YOU MAKE OF IT
Pull Up a Chair, Then Fix It
Published: May 23, 2012
IT’S hard not to get swept up in the excitement of Design Week in New York, when the newest home furnishings are introduced at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and related events happen all over town.
Not everyone, it turns out, has left them for dead.
Last Saturday, as part of a conference called MakeShift, Natalie Chanin, the founder of the fashion label Alabama Chanin, held a workshop to rehabilitate some of these castoffs at Partners & Spade on Great Jones Street. The event, which she called Crafting Design, was dedicated to resurrecting the bent, twisted and broken remnants of what the poet David McFadden has described as “the most ubiquitous and important design element in the domestic environment”: the chair.
But with New York’s bed bug scare still going strong, finding enough eligible chairs (more than 20, so that every participant would have at least one to work on) was more challenging than anyone anticipated.
Organizers finally decided that while steel and plastic chairs found on the street were fair game, wooden chairs were too risky, and only those found online were accepted as candidates for rehabilitation. Still, by the morning of the event there was a good-size pile for attendees to pick through outside Partners & Spade.
Amy Devers and Tanya Aguiñiga, Los Angeles-based designers who were in New York for the fair, each found a chair within minutes.
“We do this for a living,” said Ms. Aguiñiga, who specializes in furniture and jewelry design. “We know what we like when we see it.”
Inside, hammers, drills, nails and sandpaper were artfully laid out for participants’ use. The 20 or so people who showed up were given only one instruction: that there were no instructions. Even so, seasoned designers like Ms. Aguiñiga and Ms. Devers and several experienced craftsmen were on hand to offer help and advice.
Cathy Bailey, an owner of Heath Ceramics, grabbed a drill and a plastic knockoff Eames chair and calmly set to work on it, weaving a zigzag pattern into the plastic seat using colorful scraps of T-shirt material provided by Ms. Chanin’s studio.
Ms. Aguiñiga quickly dismantled the weathered seat of her wooden chair. Then she grabbed a handful of T-shirt strips and began weaving them through the back of the chair, creating a soft multicolored backrest. For the seat, she used thin rope to provide structural support and then applied a layer of navy-blue T-shirt material on top.
Ms. Devers, a furniture designer and the star of “Fix This Yard” on A&E, was hammering nails into the seat and back of her old Ikea chair, piling T-shirt scraps on top and carefully threading them through the nail bedding, so that the material began to take on the appearance of a colorful shag rug. One lone, loose piece from the back was left to dangle gracefully to the ground.
Soon, two hours had passed, and it was time to assess the results. All the castoff chairs had been restored to life, and some could have held their own at the furniture fair.
But that was not their destiny. Instead, it was decided that they should be returned to the streets where they came from, to pass on inspiration to whomever found them.
And so, at the end of the day, they were back on the sidewalk. Several of them sat on a corner in Chinatown, beside a pile of trash, where curious passers-by could peruse them.
Perhaps some lucky person took them home.
Natalie Chanin, the founder of the fashion label Alabama Chanin, held a workshop at Partners & Spade in Manhattan as part of the MakeShift conference. It was dedicated to rehabilitating chairs.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Discarded chairs awaiting resurrection in the workshop.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Tanya Aguiñiga, a Los Angeles-based designer, quickly dismantled the weathered seat of her wooden chair and began weaving T-shirt strips through its back.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
The woven strips create a soft, multicolored backrest.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Amy Devers, a furniture designer based in Los Angeles and the star of “Fix This Yard” on A&E, hammered nails into the seat and back of an old Ikea chair and carefully threaded T-shirt scraps through the nail bedding.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
The material began to take on the appearance of a colorful shag rug.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Sadé Hooks laces a chair. The 20 or so people who showed up were given only one piece of instruction: that there were no instructions.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Hammers, drills, nails and sandpaper were artfully laid out for use.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
The chair by Ms. Aguiñiga, left. For the seat, she used thin rope to provide structural support and then layered navy-blue T-shirt material on top. Right, Ms. Devers’s chair.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
A chair by Will Luckman.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Kristen Wentcrek upended a chair, removing the seat from the metal base, flipping the base on its side, and affixing the seat to the legs.
Credit: Robert Wright for The New York Times
Chairs Reborn
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