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.

Handle It
Does this handle thingy do anything in terms of cleanliness? I’m gonna take a bold guess and say no. Seems like the dreaded “fecal plume” triggered by flushing would grace both the underside of the lid and this handle. But does it spark joy? You decide.

The Slammer
Thou shalt not have “soft-close” (a.k.a. “slow-close” or “no-slam”) and regular toilet seats in the same household. Why? You will forget and slam the trad seats in the rest of the house. In general I’m not in favor of the slow-close seat as why would I want to introduce a point of failure in a simple device that might otherwise last decades all for just a minor, lazy convenience?

Ghosts in the Machine
Motion activated faucets, towel dispensers and hand dryers in public restrooms don’t work half the time in my experience. When, despite waving my hands back and forth, I fail to activate these things I feel like the main character in the 1962 cult film Carnival of Souls who wanders Salt Lake City before we all realize she’s a ghost. But maybe ghosts would more easily trigger these damn things?

Fecal Plume: Electric Boogaloo
Hot air hand dryers are bullshit. There, I said it.

I’m thankful for the luxury of being able to do a completely pointless project occasionally. In this case using scrap wood from the fence I built to make models of the Garret Rietveld chairs and tables I built during the pandemic.

I think I need to do this more often. Chores be damned!

If Herbert Marcuse did a lot of cocaine and ditched critical theory for interior design he might have penned this very much of its time coffee table book: Sensuous Space: How to Create Romantic, Seductive and Sensuous Settings by Sivon Reznikoff. Reznikoff owned the Louisiana Interior Design Institute in Baton Rouge, and was a professor of Environmental/Interior Design at Arizona State University. She adopted a gender ambiguous name in order to work in the male dominated field of architecture and interior design.

I reference Marcuse because this tome has much more theory in it than you’d expect. Before you get to the photo spreads of shag rug lined love dens and teal penthouses you’ll encounter thirty pages of thoughtstylings and graphs. Reznikoff posits three types of Eros driven spaces: romantic, seductive and sensuous that then break out into specific color, form texture, musical and even scent suggestions over the many pages of charts, spreadsheets and graphs. We’re 30 pages in by the time we see our first hot tub.

The power nexus of the erotic panopticons in this book are, naturally, your disco control centers because your house must have its own private discotheque. I don’t know how you keep the blow from gumming up the electronics.

Of course, such idiosyncratic spaces are the domain of the ultra-wealthy who can afford serial remodeling. Reznikoff notes that many of these spaces are second homes. A particular class of nouveau riche spring for this kind of sensual ostentation. The really wealthy elite go for austere modernist boxes to make a show that they put their money back into capital accumulation rather than spending it on gold swan faucets and pebble lined hot tubs.

The interior sensuousness of this book ended in the AIDS/Reagan era 80s  and now you’re more likely to see the nouveau riche class burn their cash by building an underground town simulacrum in their McMansions.

The last time we saw this kind of decadent sexuality in architecture was the Art Nouveau period of the 1890s and early 20th century which ended in the horrors of WWI. Its reappearance comes intertwined with the liberatory politics of the 60s and 70s but those same left movements can prove prudish. Perhaps the flipper white cubes will get all funky and sinuous in our Acid Communist future and maybe we’ll have a more expanded and nuanced view of what “eros” means than the reductionist wife swapping parties of the Sensuous Spaces era. My shag conversation pit lacks a crystal ball.

Thanks to Cocaine Decor for tipping me off to this book.