Max Lamb

In this blog I’m going to talk about Max Lamb’s work. The work of his that was shown in class really grabbed my attention because of the way that he makes his pieces. It’s tough to give a name to his work because it falls between the long discussed gray area of art and design.

First I’ll start with what it is that interests me about Lamb’s work. I love working at the shops in ID. I tend to spend 4-7 hours a day, 4-6 days a week. That’s 16-35 hours a week of shop time. Because of this love for working in the shops, I always get really excited when I see other people working with the same type of machines and materials as I do.

Max Lamb used the wood lathe to turn his concrete stools, which is one of my favorite machines in the shops. The pewter chair that Max Lamb did is also interesting to me because I am currently in the Cast Iron class.

The wood lathe, unlike the metal lathe, is a free form machine. With the metal lathe, your cutting tool is attached to the machine itself, and the cutting tool is moved by turning a series of dials. With the wood lathe, the cutting tool is in your hands. You can quickly and dramatically change the shape of the object that you are turning. It’s a very natural process. You never know what shape you are going to pull out of the material until you are done.

Once you make a piece on the lathe, it is possible to set up a pattern so that making that exact same shape is easy. To me, the concrete chairs that Lamb makes seem like a good example of limited production industrial design. They are art because the processes that is used to make them is free form and intuitive, but they are Industrial Design because they can be reproduced easily and in the same manner that they were made.

I have a much harder time counting the cast pewter chair as ID. The process of putting a plastic chair in the sand and then pouring pewter around it is an example of a one-time use mold. Once the piece has been removed from the sand, there is no way to use to same mold again. The chair that was first used is gone, destroyed in the process of casting the pewter chair.

While I think that it is interesting what people are doing with different materials, I don’t think things like Lamb’s pewter chair fall under functional industrial design. To me, this approach is more like art design. I think when someone is making one off chairs and things along this line; it becomes art rather than industrial design. I think of industrial design as something that can be mass produced.

When you cast a chair in the sand using a lose pattern, it is hard to make another one. You would either have to cast it and make a mold out of it to be used in a factory, or you would make another one using the same processes of putting a chair in the sand and casting it out of pewter. This would not make a chair that was exactly the same, and it would therefore be a similar, but different, chair.

It is hard to look at all this art/design work that is being done and say exactly what is art and what is design. I think for me the difference between one off design and art is the ability for design to be mass produced. I think that playing around with materials is a good way to find new ways the manipulate and uses materials, but I have a hard time looking at what Max Lamb and others like him are doing and see how it relates to Industrial Design. It seems more like well thought out play than design.

This being said, what excites me about Lamb's work is that when I look at it, and see him enjoying his work, I see the same things that I enjoy about my work. I think that we should learn to incorporate that play into design and most importantly into the design process. I think that when we are having fun in our work we will come up with better designs.