if my table was a boat

...made of fencing

A little over a week ago we made a 27 foot table for the dinner series at Open Satellite. One Pot is Micheal Hebb's experiment with the meal-event and place-making.  His idea is to create a narrative about fragmented and misunderstood places through the shared event of a simple meal.  This most recent event was the first of five dinners to take place in unconventional sites around Bellevue.  Special guests were asked to think of a significant site in Bellevue to host four upcoming dinners open to the public.

I leaped at the opportunity to design a table for this event even though the budget was a ridiculous 300 dollars.  It was to be iconic, nautical in spirit, collapsible, storable, large enough for 25 people, small enough for 6 and also suitable for a craft table. For $300. Umm yeah. 

I insisted it would be possible if we re-used the wood we had saved from Meiro Koizumi's exibit.  We imagined using the framing lumber, but Micheal fell in love with the faded cedar fencing that had served as the strawberry-shed siding.  At first this seemed impossible.

I thought hard.

We thought hard...

And we came up with a three-part structure with no fasteners: four hollow-core doors from Home Depot, blue paint, one left-over sheet of plywood from SUPERMODEL, cedar fencing (thank you Craig's List) and 10 metal clamps on sale at Harbor Freight.

And it worked!

And it fit in my Subaru.

And Mattew Stadler- founder of Publication Studio and quite possibly the most eloquent speaker ever, posted pictures of it on his blog even though the posts were about his books and I think the clamps annoyed him and I forgot a bag of compost-bound oyster shells in his bath tub.  But who cares.

It was awesome.

But the table was just the vessel.  The whole point of the event was a conversation, and Matthew's opening toast says it all.  He proposed we stop measuring our cities according to a European ideal; that we open ourselves to the unlikely experiences afforded by sprawling unruly places like Bellevue; that we look for opportunities in strip malls and parking lots.

He gave clarity to my inklings.  Is it really a coincidence that Bellevue is more diverse that Seattle...that we have had to travel here from Seattle to participate in good art?  Maybe strip-malls are quaint in their quaintlessness. Could a chain-restaurant be unique?   Can a public residency for artists -a gallery- be an epicenter for community?  Perhaps excessive planning and preservation make a place go stale... 

Codes and zoning don't create public life, people do- and people are affected by their surroundings.  The role of architecture and art then, is to create a vessel for community.  So how do you create a vessel that simultaneously reflects and steers existing activity...?

With a few doors, leftover plywood and some cedar fencing.