Grid Beam chair from gridbeam.xyz

Root Simple reader LeJun, responding to my post on my Enzo Mari table, left a link to two more ideas in the sphere of DIY furniture: Grid Beam and Open Structures.

Grid Beam, pioneered by Ken Isaacs in his book How to Build Your Own Living Structures, relies on either wood or metal with a regular series of holes drilled to accept bolts. Grid Beam is modular and you can use the method to make chairs, tables, beds and rooms. Pieces can be taken apart, reused and reconfigured. If you want to try it you’ll definitely want a drill press and a jig to make the holes uniform and square. Thankfully you can find many used drill presses in the wild as they are a common tool in both wood and metal shops.

Open Structures table from openstructures.net

Open Structures is a similar modular concept by Brussels designer Thomas Lommée done with metal tubes and connectors. I find it a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the drilled 2×2 lumber in the Grid Beam system, but you’ll need to be handy with metal if you want to try to homebrew this.

Note that I’ve got a whole roundup post about DIY furniture on Root Simple here. Many thanks to LeJun for the tips and I’ve amended that older post with Grid Beam and Open Structures.

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.