Australian architect Adam Markowitz will showcase REFRACTIONS, an international collaboration with Phantom Hands, one of India’s top furniture manufacturers – now selling merchandise in Europe, North America and Australia.
Together, they will showcase a dining table, bench, two pendant lights, and a wall sconce, all made from American red oak, cheery, and maple. This is the first in what promises to be a promising collaboration between Australian designers and Indian manufacturers.
Commissioned by the American Hardwood Export Council, the leading trade association for American hardwoods – which has tripled the trade of timbers into India over the past 12 months, the showcase will be a key feature of BLR Hubba, a two-week cultural extravaganza in Bangalore starting in December:
“Through collaborations, which involve passing on much-needed technical knowledge and hands-on experience, AHEC hopes to encourage more manufacturers in India to choose American hardwoods,” said AHEC’s Regional Director Roderick Wiles. “We can’t wait to unveil the collection later this year.”
Reflecting on REFRACTIONS, Adam – who also teaches at the ExLab experimental Design Studio at the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne School of Design and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine, USA – was initially apprehensive about the collaboration:
Partially because of the intimidating array of designers already working with them, but also because of apprehensions about the nature of the collaboration, I was very conscious of being an outsider in India, being unfamiliar with the culture, and wanting to make sure that the project was a genuinely collaborative process. I wanted the work to look like it could not have happened anywhere else.
Adam Markowitz, founder of Adam Markowitz Design.
To put fears to rest, Adam extensively read and researched the experience of Corbusier and the Eames in India, the foundation of the National Institute of Design (NID) as well as critiques of foreign designers falling into the trap of ‘orientalism’ and fetishising the ‘otherness’ of India.
I did arrive in India with some initial ideas; however, these were quickly set aside. I was reassured and steered out of this existential trouble with the encouragement that whatever we did would inherently achieve this goal and that trying to shoehorn it in from the start would be counterproductive. Deepak Srinath and Aparna Rao, Co-founders of Phantom Hands, identified the key things they appreciated about my work – the blend of being an architect, furniture designer and woodworking craftsman. This mutual understanding and appreciation set the foundation for our collaboration from the outset.
Adam on going to India and meeting with the co-founders of Phantom Hands
Phantom Hands—who had not previously worked with the American hardwood species — was aware of Adam’s work with bending and curvature in wood and was interested in learning more about those techniques. Ideally, the work would involve bending and curvature to encourage skill sharing.
Aparna then asked Adam to consider the Wood Rose, a unique flower that had personal significance to her, as a possible starting point – forming the basis of the project’s defining elements and shaping the initial design process.
Key to the design approach was the idea of curvature. From the outset, I elected to use bent laminating as the primary bending technique. There are some unique characteristics of bending wood, requiring an understanding of the ways that it likes to bend (e.g. – around one axis, and generally with the grain of the wood). To laminate wood, you slice the timber into thin veneers. These thin veneers are individually flexible, which allows you to bend them into the shape and then glue them back together. The curves of the resultant shapes can be incredibly strong. This is the inherent strength of curvature and what my designs were looking to explore,
Adam on the inheriant strength of the American hardwoods used in the collaboration.
A key part of the collaboration involved knowledge transfer and skill sharing…
Working remotely from, Australia before travelling to Bangalore, Adam helped the Phantom Hands team master methods for laminating timber, including techniques for sawing veneer, stitching veneer together into larger panels, jig-making for pressing veneers into shapes and gluing with clamps and a vacuum press. Despite the language barrier, Adam was able to build rapport with the team in India and learn a lot from watching them work:
The Indian way of woodworking is very interesting as it seems to sit halfway between Western and Eastern woodworking techniques (e.g. Japanese and Chinese). The work is done on the floor in an eastern style. The planes they use are a combination of steel and wood (Japanese & Chinese planes are primarily only wood), and are used in a push motion, a sort of a hybrid between a western style and an eastern style. The saws work in a pull manner in an Eastern style. What impressed me was the accuracy of the curvature and joinery, which is still executed entirely by hand, without CNC or even advanced jigs. So much is still down to the skill of the particular craftsperson.
Adam on the difference between Western and Eastern woodworking techniques
Hands-on work on prototypes was valuable, as the team refined the shapes in real-time.
Aparna also identified something she particularly enjoyed about Adam’s work as the sculptural quality—the feeling of the hand in the work. This hands-on approach helped helped Adam and the Phantom Hands team develop an understanding built on the language of furniture making.
In addition to the factory visits, Adam worked with the two carpenters and a technical lead via zoom and online messaging tools on some of the early prototyping and techniques.
It was through AHEC that we could confront some of our misconceptions and biases around the use of nonindigenous species of hardwood. The expertise and knowledge about timber standards and woodworking processes that came along with the collaboration have been deeply educational. Through the development of the collection, we were able to quickly delve into the uncharted subject of wood bending and building forms and structures with them. Armed with Adam’s proactive, rigorous, and patient insights we have been able to expand the range of our hand-crafted techniques and design language.
Aparna Rao, CoFounder, Phantom Hands.
Given Adam’s hands-on relationship with the material, it was agreed that the best way to explore that was for him to get hands-on with the prototypes. According to Markowitz, working with large curved laminated objects is challenging because much of traditional woodworking revolves around using square straight reference faces and working your joinery backwards from there.
When you make large, curved shapes, you lose these reference edges, and the ability to use a lot of typical measuring & marking tools. So a lot of the teaching revolved around how to operate with the curves once done – how to keep things straight, square and symmetrical.
Adam Markowitz, with whom AHEC has worked on two previous projects, brings his wealth of knowledge of working with American hardwoods as both an architect and furniture designer/maker to this collaboration with India’s highest profile furniture manufacturer – Phantom Hands.
With no experience working with American hardwoods, Phantom Hands is now making five designs in cherry, maple, and red oak donated by the Rossi Group.
Learn more about the three species.
- About American red oak (Quercus species, mainly Quercus rubra)
Warm, grainy, tough and bendy. Reaching a height of 21m with a trunk diameter of 1m, red oak is the most abundant species in America’s hardwood forests. Named for the colour of its leaves in the fall, this classic oak wood has light brown sapwood and a heartwood characterized by attractive warm reddish-pink tones. Red oak is strong, straight-grained, coarse-textured, and distinctive. Its porosity makes it a premium wood for bending and staining.
- About American maple (Acer saccharum, Acer nigrum, Acer rubrum)
Light, fine, hard and incandescent. A close cousin of European maple and sycamore, American maple can reach heights of 23–27m, with a trunk diameter of 75cm. This project uses two botanical subspecies, hard and soft maple, which share similar characteristics and are relatively abundant. Hard maple is a cold climate species favouring the northern states, whereas soft maples grow more widely across the mixed hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Both hard and soft maple produce syrup.
- About American cherry (Prunus serotina)
Rich, smooth, vibrant and flexible. A medium-sized tree reaching a height of around 20m, cherry has a relatively short rotation, taking less time to mature than other hardwoods. The narrow sapwood is a light pinkish, while the heartwood varies from rich red to reddish brown, and darkens on exposure to light. American cherry had a long period of popularity in furniture making; it became less popular but is on the verge of a revival.
