I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

My friend John came over last week with a stack of 2x6s that have been sitting in his yard for awhile and we spent the day making one of Italian artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari’s tables.

A few years ago a reader tipped me off to Mari’s book Autoprogettazione, a difficult to translate neologism that means, literally, “self-design”. The book (free download here) contains a suite of furniture that Mari describes as a “project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails.” With just rudimentary tools, pretty much anyone could use his book to furnish their own house. John and I built the base of this table in a day and I added the top the next day. This is significantly faster than the fussy hardwood arts and crafts stuff I usually make, which can take months to complete just one piece.

You don’t need a wood shop to make Mari’s furniture. That said, John and I were able to reclaim some of his twisted 2x6s using my jointer, planer and table saw. But here’s where things get confusing. European readers please correct me if I’m wrong here, but when Mari calls for a 25mm x 50mm piece of lumber he means literally that, what would be 1-inch by 2-inches in our convoluted imperial measurements. The problem is that a “1×2” on this side of the pond is actually 3/4-inch by 1 1/2-inch. The luxury of having woodworking tools is that I can plane down larger pieces of wood to make any dimension that I need, so we were able to make the 25mm x 50mm stock Mari calls for from our larger “2x6s”. But if you’re not fortunate enough to have these expensive tools, I think it would be easy to make this same table with slightly thinner wood, fresh from the lumber yard, without any significant sacrifice in strength.

Mari’s designs take their inspiration from American house framing which replaced earlier timber framing methods. Balloon framing, and its more fire-safe 20th century replacement, platform framing, democratize construction and put building in the hands of anyone with a hammer and nails. The clever thing about Mari’s furniture is that it exposes the framing that’s normally hidden in a way that’s both aesthetically pleasing and functional, a bit like Frank Gehry’s early work. Mari’s furniture is based on triangular bracing that he imagined could be applied to any piece. He imagined that if you wanted a custom piece you could use this principle to make anything, hence the notion of “self-design”.

Mari struggles with many contradictions in the text that accompanies the designs. Will a table inspired by framing appeal to workers who actually frame things or just well to do hobbyists such as myself? Probably the latter. He also points out that industrially made furniture requires less material than the examples in this book.

I experienced my own contradictions making this table. Using reclaimed lumber meant the base was free but the decking material used for the top (it’s an outdoor table) was expensive. And my little modernist experiments in furniture–this table and my Gerrit Rietveld chairs–live outside, while a Medievalist arts and crafts fantasy plays out in the furniture I’ve build for the inside of the house. Such is the fate of attempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while not letting this discourse get in the way of making objects of usefulness and beauty and helping others to have nice things at a reasonable cost.

Of Purple Prose and Re-Enchantment

I lieu of links this week, here’s a conversation between three of my favorite writers, Richard Seymour, China Mieville, and David Bentley Hart. Topics include “dandy” prose, materialism and metaphysics, non-human intelligence, and if you stick it out to the end, a moving plea to re-enchant the world.

It’s a long conversation and technical in places, but well worth a close listening.

Thanks to Daniel Saunders for the tip.

Air Quality Citizen Science: Measuring Pollution with an AirBeam

Los Angeles Library card holders can check out an air quality monitor and participate in a crowd-sourced science project to monitor and map air quality.

I checked out a portable monitor at the Central Library, called an AirBeam, that measures two kinds of particulate pollution and feeds the results to an app on your smartphone. The AirBeam looks at two different sizes of particulate matter: PM2.5 and PM10. PM2.5, the smaller of the two, comes mostly from burning gasoline, diesel fuel and wood. PM10 (which, somewhat confusingly, includes PM2.5 particles) comes partly from fossil fuel but also consists of dust from agriculture, construction, wildfires and pollen.

The AirBeam has a loop which I attached to my belt, allowing me to take the device on my morning dog walks. The period in early August that I took measurements was unusually good for Los Angeles in August due to a mild weather. Only on one day did smoke from a distant fire up the central coast give me a reading that air quality officials would deem as “unhealthy”. It should be noted that there is actually no level of particulate matter that is “healthy” but, even without human activity, there would still be some particulate matter.

The app gives you both a graph of your readings and a map view, in this case from a walk I took down to the always congested 101 freeway. Everyone can view results via the web on this map.

You can also use the AirBeam to make stationary measurements indoors. Indoor particulate matter consists of things such as cigarette smoke and mold spores. Thankfully we seem to have good indoor air quality.

The real promise of the AirBeam and the LA Library’s lending project lies in creating a hyper-local mapping of pollution as well as creating a kind of air pollution literacy. With a lot of people wandering around with these monitors we might be able to identify pollution hot spots in need of attention. While there is more to air pollution than just particulate matter, I also feel like I have a better idea of what air quality reports mean and almost a nose for it.

In addition to the AirBeam, the LA Library also has a number of other kits you can check out to monitor mosquitos, light pollution, water quality, biodiversity, and heat island effects. They also have curriculum materials to support these kits if you’d like to make these part of a school project.

Weekend Linkages: Bass Face

Meme found on the interwebs (not sure where). Totally agree about Trader Joe’s!

On the Origin of the Bass Face

Demonstrating neighbourhood-scale civic infrastructure for social, ecological, economic, and climate transition

A school for “radical attention”

The rock’s the star: meditative film about a Cornish stone goes global

A Kali Mirch Paneer Pasta Recipe from Pijja Palace

Pentagon’s Budget Is So Bloated That It Needs an AI Program to Navigate It

Mr. Charlie’s: The Vegan Fast Food Joint that Looks Familiar But is Unlike Anything You’ve Seen Before