Part IV · A longer view

A Thousand-Year Brief

A few nights a year I sleep on the ground in southern Utah, on the San Rafael Swell. It is a blister of rock the size of a county, pushed up out of the desert and then sawn to pieces by water that is mostly gone. I go to look at rock art. In the family taxonomy I am a rock rat. I will drive a long way on a bad road to sleep on sandstone and wake up stiff for it.

The panels I like have no name, no sign, no register to put your initials in. Finding them is a game I play against people dead for a thousand years. I try to think like one of them. Walking this country for water and game and stone, spending as little effort as possible, which way would I go? Somewhere along that route, where is the overhang you would wait out a storm under, or the boulder you would gather at? Guess the route right and often enough there it is, on a sheltered face of Navajo sandstone: a sheep, a spiral, a broad-shouldered figure with too few fingers, watching the same valley I am.

I do not know the age of most of the rock art I visit. Its survival makes a thousand years easier to contemplate and harder to claim for something I might make. I cannot know who would use a chair in 3026, or what they would want from it. I can use the horizon to question the choices I make now.

A thousand years is an extreme design constraint. I do not have to predict that far ahead to find it useful. I can ask what a repair would require if the original supplier were unavailable, or what information would be lost if the chair became separated from its drawings. Those questions arise on shorter horizons too. The large number makes it harder for me to dismiss them as someone else's problem.

I can offer respectable reasons for the undertaking: take repair seriously, make room for future people, avoid wasting material and knowledge. They are real interests of mine. They are not the complete explanation for why I am in the shop. Some of those reasons arrived after I was already sanding. The pleasure of making something came first.

There is also the pleasure of having made it. Whitman called it a "barbaric yawp," and I recognize the impulse: I exist, I made this, it is good. An object lets me say that without having to give a speech. Wanting the object to outlive me adds a more ambitious wish. I do not have to describe that wish as entirely selfless to take the work seriously.

The useful discipline is to keep those motives from becoming evidence. My pleasure in making the chair does not establish its comfort. My interest in repair does not show that a future owner will attempt one. A thousand-year ambition cannot settle the thickness of a board. I still have to make an armchair that serves a person now, using the material and skills available to me.

For examples of the work longevity actually required, I looked at wooden buildings. At Horyu-ji, old structures have been maintained across centuries. At Ise Jingu, rebuilding passes a design and the skills of making it from one generation to the next. The distinction I had found between a surviving object and a continuing design now raised a question about work: who would keep doing it, and what would they need to know?

Replacing parts raises a further question: how much of the original object needs to remain? There is an old puzzle about a ship. A vessel is repaired at sea over the years, one rotten board swapped for a sound one, then another, until not a single original plank remains. Is it the same ship? The ship of Theseus makes a philosophical puzzle of replacement. My chair presented a practical version: could a maker replace one worn piece while the surviving parts still showed where it belonged? I did not need to settle the ship's identity to want that property in a chair.

For this chair I returned to Kratstoel. The replica I had built early in the project was already a chair I liked. It did not need to become a Keel Panel to justify itself. Its flat boards, square cuts, and exposed construction offered a useful starting point for another brief.

By September 29 I was sitting in a prototype and still making decisions. My notes began: "Hard! So many decisions." My tentative choice was an armchair for sitting, talking, and working, rather than napping. A board laid across the arms could carry a laptop. That use suggested less recline and a somewhat lower back than a chair intended primarily for resting. I thought such a chair might find a continuing place in a household. That is a judgment to test, not a prediction I can verify.

I wanted flat boards of a common section and square cuts. I considered separate arm caps, then rejected them because the attachment or joinery felt fussy. With the stock I was using, I judged the arms functional without caps. The projecting ends of the angled pieces, the "flying tails," let me retain square cuts and acknowledge Rietveld. Not every detail needed a thousand-year explanation; some had immediate reasons in making and appearance.

I identified three refinements of Kratstoel. One combined the angled cleat and lateral-member functions. Another used a truss in place of a broad lapped connection with several robust fasteners. The third treated cushioning as part of the design from the start. Those changes did not establish that Rietveld's joints were inadequate, or that all chairs should be triangulated. They described the chair I now wanted to make.

The cushions were to be renewable. My current plan used springs, foam, and leather on a seat frame, and foam on a flat back panel. I did not expect those materials to remain untouched for a millennium. I wanted the wooden frame to accommodate future replacements, perhaps made by methods I do not know.

Replacement need not mean reconstructing my upholstery exactly. A later owner might want a different covering, a different filling, or a different degree of softness. I would like to make that possible without asking the owner to redesign the wooden frame. The attachment needs to be understandable, and the cushion needs to come away without damage to the parts intended to remain.

There is a limit to how much adaptation I can provide for. I cannot make one frame fit every body, room, or use. I can avoid treating my first choice of cushion as inseparable from the chair. That is a smaller and more concrete ambition than asking someone to preserve every detail I chose in 2026.

Plain boards also offered a fallback. If nobody wanted the chair, I would rather someone reclaim its wood than discard it. I was already considering that for the walnut from my Noguchi table. For this chair, I wanted to avoid glued assemblies and connections that required cutting the boards apart to release them. Someone might eventually need the oak more than they needed a chair. That would end the chair's life, but useful boards would be an acceptable outcome. The wood I was buying had already served as part of a building; I did not need to insist that my use be its last.

I had also found old oak. Its previous life could add something to the chair, but it would first have to become usable stock. While I waited for it, I could keep working on the plywood prototype and the seat I would put in it.

A chapter of The Hundred-Year Chair, drafted and refined in public. The same text lives in the book; the interactive tools and the fully-sourced technical notes live here. home · the book · the technical notes · hundredyearchair.com