Descending Ashtray

Editor’s note: On my last trip of the spring (I hope), Sarah and I visited my sister and her husband in Boston, a trip we planned long before the string of weddings and work trips that have kept me away from this site and occupied for the last few months. Back (literally) to the drawing board soon, I promise.

Down the street from my sister’s North End apartment is the North Bennett Street School, a woodworking school I first became aware of in my copy of The Workshop, a book of tool porn I picked up a few years ago. Several months after I purchased the book, I visited my sister for the first time and happened to walk by. I’ve been thinking about getting inside ever since, and I finally had my chance last week. Head of Admissions Robert Delaney was kind enough to give Sarah and I a tour.

The North Bennett Street School was founded in 1885, designed to educate unskilled immigrants in trades including cabinetmaking and jewelry making. Today, it has expanded to include other disciplines, including violin/cello making, bookbinding, carpentry, and locksmithing, with a focus on real vocational training. The focus is not on presenting part-time workshops or classes for the hobbyist, but on training people to become full-time craftsmen and -women.

One thing they are known for instilling in all the furniture students is to always begin each project with a full-scale drawing, from leg length down to the last dovetail. The idea is that you work out a project’s unique challenges on paper, which is obviously a lot cheaper than Honduran Mahogany. I was pretty jealous of this student’s large drawing table.

Over the school’s 150+ year history, they’ve collected a lot of furniture, parts and pieces of which make up a large library of furniture components students can study, including Cabriole legs and even hardware like antique brass drawer pulls and hinges.

The curriculum taught is based in the techniques used by makers in 18th Century America, a time period that is viewed by the school as the pinnacle of furniture-making. Administrators are careful to emphasize that Bennett Street is not a design school, and do not choose this period for its aesthetics, but for its exemplary craft. They feel the techniques for furniture making used in that time period literally cannot get better, and facility with these techniques should allow graduates to create any style of furniture they choose, and do so with extremely high craftsmanship. As such, the aesthetics of a student’s work are not the most important aspect, but rather how well they demonstrate the skills used to build it. Hence this piece of student inlay, not pleasing to my visual tastes, but remarkably made:

While at the school, each student will build at least four pieces of furniture, beginning with a toolbox which will serve them at the school. Students design their own, within a set of guidelines, but wood and hardware selection provide a way for students to differentiate according to their own tastes. I really like the one on the left.

I doubt I will ever attend this school, although it looked incredible. Boston is a great town, but very expensive, and I’m just not sure I could give up our house, with its two-car garage shop. It did get me thinking about grad school again, though … being around a group of really passionate people working towards the same goals again sounds … well, great. We’ll see.