Posts Tagged ‘Shakers’
“If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it”*…
The Shakers, a millennial Christian sect founded in the mid-18th century, are characterized by their simple, communal lives… and their celibacy (as a product of which there are only three known Shakers alive today). That said, they had an outsized impact on design– now on display at Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Jane Enfield unpacks the Shakers’ legacy…
Vitra Design Museum is presenting The Shakers: A World In Making, an exhibition highlighting the enduring design principles of the 18th-century Shakers who prioritised utilitarianism, craftsmanship and ethics.
Designed by Milan studio Formafantasma, the exhibition spotlights the design legacy of the Shakers, a Protestant sect founded in England around 1747 whose members created unadorned and meticulously built architecture and furniture.
“Today, the relevance of Shaker principles feels more urgent than ever,” Vitra Design Museum curator Mea Hoffmann told Dezeen.
“Their approach to democratic design, combining utilitarian function with exceptional craftsmanship and ethical intent, offers a compelling alternative to the excesses of modern consumer culture.”…
… The historical works were created after the Shakers emigrated to the USA in 1774, where they established 18 communities from Kentucky to Maine and created pieces that set the tone for a utilitarian, wood-heavy trend that endures to this day.
Among Hoffmann’s highlights is an four-metre-long bench from 1855, which was designed as communal but gender-segregated seating for the traditional Shaker meetinghouse.
“Community and shared property were at the heart of Shaker life,” explained the curator.
“There’s something very compelling about the inherent proximity that comes from sitting together on a bench – you can’t help but feel your connection to the people around you.”
Also on display is an “elevator” shoe, created around 1890. The footwear was specially designed with a raised sole for a woman whose legs were of two different lengths to facilitate her mobility.
“The Shakers were dedicated to including all members in daily life and often adapted or created objects to allow everyone to contribute,” noted Hoffmann.
The curator emphasised that the exhibition strives to highlight the Shakers’ knack for embracing external influences despite their particular way of life, highlighting the sect as early adopters of electricity, indoor plumbing and telecommunications.
An object that reflects this is a 1925 radio designed by trailblazer Elder Irving Greenwood, who is said to have persuaded the Canterbury Shakers to install electricity throughout his New Hampshire community in 1909.
“It’s an interesting example of the Shakers’ openness to technological change and innovation,” reflected Hoffmann. “Although they retreated from the world, the radio demonstrates that this apparent division may have been far more permeable.”
“Beyond adopting existing technologies, the Shakers also engineered their own machinery, such as steam engines and specialised cutting devices, to streamline labour-intensive tasks,” continued the curator.
“As they mass-produced their standardised goods, they also developed the tools necessary to improve production.”…
… Considering the sect’s enduring visual language, Hoffmann described the Shakers as holding a “unique position within the design canon”.
“Although their object culture emerged from an organic craft tradition rather than a centralised design ideology, their work has had a lasting influence, particularly on 20th-century Scandinavian designers such as Kaare Klint and Børge Mogensen, and continues to inspire contemporary practitioners today,” said Hoffmann.
“In many ways, Shaker design anticipated modern aesthetics, though it was entirely unintentional,” concluded the curator. “It’s an interesting example of groups of people getting to similar places from very different starting points.”…
More (and more photos) at: “Shaker exhibition at Vitra Design Museum “feels more urgent than ever‘,” from @dezeen.com.
* Shaker maxim
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As we keep it simple, we might spare a thought for a contemporary of the earliest Shakers, Richard Lovell Edgeworth; he died on this date in 1817. A politician and writer, he is best remembered as an inventor (perhaps most notably– and Shaker-like– a turnip-cutter and a velocipede [an early bicycle]).
That said, Edgeworth was no Shaker. He was a member of the Lunar Society, an informal organization of Birmingham-based industrialists, scientists, and intellectuals that met regularly to discuss and share ideas relating to their (amny and various) fields of interest. Other members included Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and James Watt.
And perhaps more tellingly, Edgeworth was anything but celibate: he married four times and fathered 22 children.
“Give credit where credit is due”*…
In the early 19th century, a young woman revolutionized the lumber business…
As a young woman, Tabitha Babbitt was a weaver in Harvard, Massachusetts. She used to watch the workers at the local sawmill. Observing them use the difficult two-man whipsaw, she noticed that half of their motion was wasted. It had two handles which two men would pull from side to side. However, the saw only cut the wood when it was being pulled forward. This meant the second or reverse pull was fairly useless other than to get the saw back to starting position which was a waste of energy. Tabitha proposed creating a round blade to increase efficiency. Eventually she came up with a prototype, attaching a circular blade to her spinning wheel, using the pedal of her wheel to power it. As the blade spun, no movement was wasted. The circular saw was connected to a water-powered machine to reduce the effort to cut lumber, meaning that wood could be cut faster with half the manpower. The first circular saw she allegedly made is in Albany, New York State USA. A larger version of her design was later installed in the sawmill.
But – Tabitha was a member of the Shakers, a Christian sect founded circa 1747 in England who had emigrated and settled in revolutionary colonial America. Their core beliefs centred round a perfect society, created through communal living, gender and racial equality, pacifism, confession of sin, celibacy and separation from the world. As such, they valued hard manual work, a simple lifestyle, and thrived on the forestry industry.
However, their beliefs prohibited any member applying for patents as they believed intellectual properties should be shared by the community with no restriction. Because she did not patent it (and according to wiki the reference to her invention exists only in Shaker lore), there is controversy over whether she was the first true inventor of the circular saw.
Two French men patented the circular saw in USA after reading about her saw in Shaker papers. One of the patentees, Stephen Miller argues she wasn’t the first inventor based on the date she joined the sect. He contended that it was invented at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village by Amos Bishop or Benjamin Bruce in 1793 – or not by a Shaker at all.
Samuel Miller obtained a patent in UK for a saw windmill which supposedly used a form of a circular saw in 1777 though the type of saw is only mentioned in passing, making it seem as though it was not his invention. Walter Taylor a few years later in same area of the United Kingdom seemed to have types of circular saws at his sawmill but in fact he only ever received patents for improvements to blockmaking.
However, it appears Babbitt’s circular saw design was much larger than other circular saw mechanisms and enough modifications were made to differentiate her invention from the rest. Her basic design was also the one that soon was copied at various American sawmills, popularising the use of circular saw in mills.
Tabitha was also credited with improving the spinning wheel head, inventing a process to manufacture false teeth, and inventing a process for manufacturing the then semi-revolutionary type of nail known as “cut nails” which replaced forged nails, a claim to fame she shares with a few other inventors including famed inventor Eli Whitney…
An unsung hero: “Tabitha Babbitt” from the Mills Archive, via Mathew Ingram‘s When the Going Gets Weird (also source of the image above).
* Attributed to Samuel Adams, who used the phrase in a late 18th century letter
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As we investigate innovation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed the first patent for an integrated circuit (U.S. Patent 3,138,743). In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby didn’t yet have the right to a summer vacation. So he spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design known as the “tyranny of numbers” (how to add more and more components, all soldered to all of the others, to improve performance). He finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12, he presented his findings to the management: a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached. Kilby pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave– proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he had solved the problem.
Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later). Kilby has been honored in many ways for his breakthrough, probably most augustly with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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