FURNITURE Sitting on a gold mine

TREVOR BODDY From Friday's Globe and Mail November 2, 2007

British Columbia at long last slaps an export levy on raw, bark-on logs. A major display of classic modernist and contemporary furniture opens in Gastown. What could possibly link this week's big forest industry news with the latest must-see promotional event in the local design world?

Lots, it turns out.

Here's how public and corporate investment policies intertwine, eventually, with the innovations of designers for our living rooms. From the founding of British Columbia right up to this decade, our forests were treated like gold deposits; trees mined from our mountain slopes, floated downstream, then shipped off to other countries in the rawest form possible. The wealth of our forests was then milled and processed offshore for use in buildings, furniture, and countless other value-added wood products.

Until the last decade or two, our reforestation policies were modest, to say the least — because we thought the gold mine of our primeval forests would support us forever, and as hewers of wood and drawers of water, British Columbians were doing quite well, thank-you very much. B.C. governments and forest companies lacked real interest in the local addition of value that comes from even so modest a task as stripping the bark off our logs — never-mind using strategic investments in designers and entrepreneurs to jump-start more than a nominal furniture and wood products industry.

Enlarge Image

Top, The Yoga chair collection.
Middle left, The Corona chair.
Middle right, One version of the classic Egg Chair.
Below, Midform wood table.

B.C.'s forest industry is in a bad way right now, and times of crisis are also times of innovation. This is why our provincial government — after decades of discussion and over the objections of large forestry companies with little interest in value-adding downstream industries — has finally placed a levy on the export of logs that have not had their bark stripped off or received further milling. This change will be a small boost for our troubled mills, the first of perhaps a hundred steps needed to extract new forms of wealth from our diminishing forests.

As a late entrant into the game of using design to add value to natural resources, British Columbia should look to the remarkable success story of the Nordic countries. Up against strong competition from such low-cost lumber producers as Russia, Brazil and yes, Canada, Nordic governments, universities and corporations made long-term investments in the support of design-intensive industries. Sweden's IKEA may be the most well-known of these, and it smarts to realize that British Columbia's raw forest bounty occasionally gets shipped to them, only to return to us as finished furniture in their huge retail stores.

For the high end of the furniture market, the real Nordic design success story is Denmark, a more useful model for B.C., because we have very high labour costs, and have missed the economies of scale of behemoths like IKEA. Lacking the forests and other raw materials of other Nordic nations, since the Second World War, Denmark has first trained, then helped market the creations of three generations of designers, and has made a lot of money doing so. Danish design is so advanced that Sweden's IKEA and Finland's Nokia both base many of their design departments around Copenhagen.

All of this is evident in Danish Way of Living, a free public exhibition on show now through December 15 at the former Storyeum space at 142 Water Street. The show combines classic examples of high modernist furniture and household object design from the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s with all-new creations. It is remarkable how many of these are designed by architects, a natural sideline to their work there, but rare in Canada. One example is the multiple black ovoid pads of the Corona Chair, designed by architect Paul Volther for the Erik Jorgensen Company.

Also on show is a new take on a 1958 global icon designed by architect Arne Jacobsen. This is the form-wrapping Egg Chair, those swiveling wombs I first encountered as an undergrad, because our student union's lounge installed stereo speakers in them so we could sample the latest rock albums in those days before MP3s. The chair is still in production from the Fritz Hansen Company, but has been given an updated look in patterned plastic-leather. Speaking of rock stars, one of these re-done Egg Chairs has a pale lime green background inscribed with a tendril-like pattern that looks like it was conceived in Prince's Paisley Park.

One of the most interesting new designs is Clauser's Yoga chair, table and bench designed by Erik Magnussen. Here a single stainless steel tube is bent a number of times to provide both a stable base and flexible back support, where once again, Denmark's trademark black ovoid pads serve as body nestling surfaces

The Yoga line and many others in Danish Way of Living are sold just down the street at Niels and Nancy Bendtsen's Inform Interiors. While Niels left his native Copenhagen shortly after his own design training, he bravely produces a fine line of Vancouver-designed and manufactured chairs and tables. Across town, Randy Bishop and Omer Arbel's Bocci line has produced a buzz in Europe and New York.

At the mobbed-out exhibition opening, Danish ambassador to Canada Poul Kristensen put things in suitably simple, clean, and modernist terms: "We are a design nation." No wonder, because furniture design and production is his small nation's sixth largest industry, employing 26,000 people, most of them in small ateliers, not large conglomerates. The Bendtsen, Bocci and other locally produced and designed furniture lines might employ, at best, 300 people. We have 25,700 good reasons to bring more high value, high impact jobs to a British Columbia only now coming to terms with the importance of design to a post-big-industrial, post-natural-resources economy.

FURNITURE Sitting on a gold mine

TREVOR BODDY From Friday's Globe and Mail November 2, 2007

British Columbia at long last slaps an export levy on raw, bark-on logs. A major display of classic modernist and contemporary furniture opens in Gastown. What could possibly link this week's big forest industry news with the latest must-see promotional event in the local design world?

Lots, it turns out.

Here's how public and corporate investment policies intertwine, eventually, with the innovations of designers for our living rooms. From the founding of British Columbia right up to this decade, our forests were treated like gold deposits; trees mined from our mountain slopes, floated downstream, then shipped off to other countries in the rawest form possible. The wealth of our forests was then milled and processed offshore for use in buildings, furniture, and countless other value-added wood products.

Until the last decade or two, our reforestation policies were modest, to say the least — because we thought the gold mine of our primeval forests would support us forever, and as hewers of wood and drawers of water, British Columbians were doing quite well, thank-you very much. B.C. governments and forest companies lacked real interest in the local addition of value that comes from even so modest a task as stripping the bark off our logs — never-mind using strategic investments in designers and entrepreneurs to jump-start more than a nominal furniture and wood products industry.

Enlarge Image

Top, The Yoga chair collection.
Middle left, The Corona chair.
Middle right, One version of the classic Egg Chair.
Below, Midform wood table.

B.C.'s forest industry is in a bad way right now, and times of crisis are also times of innovation. This is why our provincial government — after decades of discussion and over the objections of large forestry companies with little interest in value-adding downstream industries — has finally placed a levy on the export of logs that have not had their bark stripped off or received further milling. This change will be a small boost for our troubled mills, the first of perhaps a hundred steps needed to extract new forms of wealth from our diminishing forests.

As a late entrant into the game of using design to add value to natural resources, British Columbia should look to the remarkable success story of the Nordic countries. Up against strong competition from such low-cost lumber producers as Russia, Brazil and yes, Canada, Nordic governments, universities and corporations made long-term investments in the support of design-intensive industries. Sweden's IKEA may be the most well-known of these, and it smarts to realize that British Columbia's raw forest bounty occasionally gets shipped to them, only to return to us as finished furniture in their huge retail stores.

For the high end of the furniture market, the real Nordic design success story is Denmark, a more useful model for B.C., because we have very high labour costs, and have missed the economies of scale of behemoths like IKEA. Lacking the forests and other raw materials of other Nordic nations, since the Second World War, Denmark has first trained, then helped market the creations of three generations of designers, and has made a lot of money doing so. Danish design is so advanced that Sweden's IKEA and Finland's Nokia both base many of their design departments around Copenhagen.

All of this is evident in Danish Way of Living, a free public exhibition on show now through December 15 at the former Storyeum space at 142 Water Street. The show combines classic examples of high modernist furniture and household object design from the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s with all-new creations. It is remarkable how many of these are designed by architects, a natural sideline to their work there, but rare in Canada. One example is the multiple black ovoid pads of the Corona Chair, designed by architect Paul Volther for the Erik Jorgensen Company.

Also on show is a new take on a 1958 global icon designed by architect Arne Jacobsen. This is the form-wrapping Egg Chair, those swiveling wombs I first encountered as an undergrad, because our student union's lounge installed stereo speakers in them so we could sample the latest rock albums in those days before MP3s. The chair is still in production from the Fritz Hansen Company, but has been given an updated look in patterned plastic-leather. Speaking of rock stars, one of these re-done Egg Chairs has a pale lime green background inscribed with a tendril-like pattern that looks like it was conceived in Prince's Paisley Park.

One of the most interesting new designs is Clauser's Yoga chair, table and bench designed by Erik Magnussen. Here a single stainless steel tube is bent a number of times to provide both a stable base and flexible back support, where once again, Denmark's trademark black ovoid pads serve as body nestling surfaces

The Yoga line and many others in Danish Way of Living are sold just down the street at Niels and Nancy Bendtsen's Inform Interiors. While Niels left his native Copenhagen shortly after his own design training, he bravely produces a fine line of Vancouver-designed and manufactured chairs and tables. Across town, Randy Bishop and Omer Arbel's Bocci line has produced a buzz in Europe and New York.

At the mobbed-out exhibition opening, Danish ambassador to Canada Poul Kristensen put things in suitably simple, clean, and modernist terms: "We are a design nation." No wonder, because furniture design and production is his small nation's sixth largest industry, employing 26,000 people, most of them in small ateliers, not large conglomerates. The Bendtsen, Bocci and other locally produced and designed furniture lines might employ, at best, 300 people. We have 25,700 good reasons to bring more high value, high impact jobs to a British Columbia only now coming to terms with the importance of design to a post-big-industrial, post-natural-resources economy.