ARCH 409, Section 1

Furniture is Architecture
Summer 2024
Instructors: Steven Mankouche
Term: Summer 2024
Section: 1
Class Number: 73640
Credits: 3
Required: No
Elective: Yes
Meets: Tue, Thu 10:00am-1:00pm  Location TBA

This course considers furniture as a moment within the scale of architecture and crucial in the education of an architect.  Wright, Eames, Saarinen, Knoll, Corbusier, van der Rohe, Aalto, Breuer, Gray, Mollino, Ponti, Magistretti, Aulenti, Albini, Panton, Jacobsen, Juhl, Wegner, Uriquiola, Stark, the list of famous architects, icons of the furniture world is countless. While many of them were not furniture “makers”, they all experienced fabrication directly during their education. This enabled them to have a much closer understanding of the furniture they designed. It also enabled them to gain material fluency when working with the craftspeople and manufacturers that produced their furniture.

In this summer course, students will have the time and space to fabricate three furniture pieces of increasing complexity. Students will be encouraged to “make” as a way of designing rather than designing to “make”.  This class will take place in the Taubman/Stamps woodshop. It will not have access to the digital fabrication facilities. This course will be wood-based covering fundamentals of furniture-making, such as hand tools, milling, joinery, turning, possibly steam bending, lamination, and finishing. While the course is architecture-centric it is open to all U-M students of varying experience levels. The pedagogy is designed to meet students where their design and fabrication skills are and build off of that.