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Comment by california-og | Hacker News Reader

I can also highly recommend Enzio Mari's Autoprogettazione furniture. Although slightly more involved in construction, all you need is standard planks, hand saw, a hammer and some nails. The instruction PDF can be found online (chairs in the latter half):

https://syllabus.pirate.care/library/Enzo%20Mari/Autoprogett...

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This reminds me of the Segal Method of housebuilding: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Segal_Method

Two of the core ideas are that the majority of the work can be undertaken by a single person with basic carpentry skills, using readily-available materials in standard sizes so there is minimal cutting and waste.

I'm always intrigued by the Segal method, but it's so closely tied to the sizes of construction materials available at the time and I can't help wondering if anything has changed since.

I'm sure it requires a bit of rethinking here or there, but there's a group of houses in Brighton, UK, that did it in the late 90s, a long time after Segal's original ideas: https://www.granddesignsmagazine.com/grand-designs-houses/he...

I've been thinking about doing this, and my main thought is that the insulation standards were probably effectively non-existent at the time, beyond "as few draughts as possible"!

Edit: not sure if these will be geo-blocked, but there are a couple of programmes about that project here:

Build: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/on-demand/...

Revisit 10+ years later: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/on-demand/...

On https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Segal_Method it says it can achieve passivhaus levels. So I would say, insulation to modern standards is within its scope

Oh, absolutely. It's just that I've seen some of the original buildings in south east London and they looked absolutely freezing - single glazing with metal-framed windows. The walls looked like thin painted plywood, but I don't think that can be the case. It looks like they've updated them now: https://programme.openhouse.org.uk/listings/1615

Having built a couple of smaller structures, I don't see why these can't be done today. Ignoring the current trend of building for curb appeal instead of practicality, you can build a house using standard size materials (8/10/12/16 foot). Even studs come in 92 5/8" to accomodate for top/bottom plates in 8 foot walls.

Just looking through that PDF, unlike the chair in the blog, some of that furniture is not as robust. Pages 46 & 47 the load rests on the corner of the wood, and pages 46, 47 & 52 add almost all load onto the screws.

The chair in the blog benefits from essentially having all load bearing done by the wood, any screws or nails would be superficial only. We have several good hard wood chairs here with dove tail joints and spring based cushions - and they are excellent.

The chair in the blog is not robust. It is simple, but not robust. It contains a hinge with an extreem amount of force placed on a small area of wood. It will deform very quickly, changing the angle of the recline. Similarly, the sharp points in contact with the ground will wear/weather quickly, putting it out of level. Rustic and utilitarian, but not meant to last. Imho.

>It will deform very quickly, changing the angle of the recline.

Nah, I've seen a bunch of these over the years, they basically last forever.

I think you should check your own knowledge before double-guessing Enzo Mari - a designer who did the work and had extensive knowledge of form and materials spanning decades.

This is not an ""argument from authority" but "Chesterton's Fence".

Both of those types of arguments are false.

I would argue that both are rhetorical heuristics rather than logical in the Boolean sense.

Maybe Enzo's implementation was fantastic, but the problem with not specifying these things is that it's not clear if one or one hundred nails should be used to secure each part.

One thing to observe is that people were lighter traditionally (i.e. prior to 1974 when this was published), and the load bearing capacity of a chair was less important than it is today. Also bare in mind that wood has become far more expensive, and people of today would likely be using less dense wood.

On page 52 for example, each leg (E) is nailed/screwed into C by just three points. The C wood itself is in a strong configuration, but the legs are almost an afterthought. Without any lower support (e.g. as shown on page 56), the nails/screws will eventually be levered out. The actual loading on the leg itself is not great, with three nails/screws seemingly aligned with the grain. The result would be a split that runs along the grain, and that may have been what happened to the left leg in the picture.

Yeah, and not specifying them - as well as not specifying the assembly steps, which for some models isn't obvious; I know it, I build the bed frame on page 24 - is part of the learning process.

"Autoprogettazione" is not a DIY book, or a guide, or a procedure. It is a project to gift common people the insight of what goes into making an object. The result Enzo seeks is not that you end up with another object/furniture in your house, but that you end up with a new appreciation of what makes an object stand up in 3D and, for example, support your weight, or flatter your eye.

If you want to follow step-by-step orders, there was and there is already hundreds of books, and thousands of workers do the same in factories - just executing orders.

Very nice! thanks for that. I really like basic agricultural do it yourself furniture. We should reclaim our furniture and be less dependent on IKEA et al. I'm defo going to try the adjustable table at the top of the pdf, thats a work of art.

Ironically, companies like Ikea have started selling products aimed at people making their own furniture; the "outdoor bench made from pallets" is pretty popular, and ikea & co sell cushions just for those.

I never understood those tbh, used pallets are splintery. I wouldn't be surprised if you can buy pallets specifically made for use in upcycle projects.

fake edit after a quick search: yup, you can buy readymade pallet benches or benches "inspired by" pallet projects.

https://www.online-pallets.nl/products/pallet-bank-2-hoog-me...

https://www.karwei.nl/assortiment/wakefield-palletbank-lina-...

Like Amazon continuing the DIY door desk long after it became more expensive than just buying desks. For some reason, people will pay a premium for the refurbished industrial look.

My understanding is that Amazon continues it for 2 reasons: it's similar priced, but more importantly they can get the doors at massive scale and they're the same. Styles, colors, materials with desks change over time. They have to source sometimes ~10k desktops in a quarter with little lead time. You can't do this with desks but you can with doors.

Or this is why they told us we wouldn't get white desks in Seattle when we had em in sfo. Even though we got the same legs.

That may well be the reason now, but they were never cost effective in my time. They were representative of an ethos the company wanted to promulgate.

Built a few desks. Got a door desk award (not for my sub par carpentry).

> I wouldn't be surprised if you can buy pallets specifically made for use in upcycle projects.

thanks, i hate it ("it" being the recuperation of DIY)

From what I've read, pallets are treated with all kinds of nasty chemicals.

Use the ones with ht stamped on them. They are very common now. They are heat treated instead of extra chems.

What is interesting also in Enzo Mari's concept is that there is no instructions, you have to figure out the best order of operations and how to offset some planks with others.

For those of you who start from really zero and have no idea how to start, here is a step-by-step for a couple of pieces: https://lieu-subjectif.com/documents/caue-22-rietveld-mari.p...

If really you want a "cheat sheet", there's whole book to help: https://filmandfurniture.com/product/hammer-nail-making-and-...

But try not to use it too much, because it really defeats the purpose of Mari, which it is to get people to "think with their hands".

Digging through the legacy and follow-ups of Autoprogettazione is also interesting:

https://lieu-subjectif.com/documents/autoprogettazione-revis...

https://greg.org/archive/mari-x-ikea.pdf

The "Harz IV" (Germany's working poors) furniture project: https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/lablog/hartz-iv-mobel-it...

Simple Japanese Furniture by Monomono / KAK Design Group: https://woodworkersinstitute.com/simple-japanese-furniture-c...

https://www.core77.com/posts/42562/Nomadic-Furniture-DIY-Des...

And and and last but not least, the great Christopher Schwarz and team at Last Art Press just got out a whole video serie and book on how to make a highly respectable chair design from very basic materials and tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pWLHAJr5zI

Note also that Lost Art Press makes their books free after some time after first publication, and have a very interesting blog:

https://blog.lostartpress.com/2024/12/27/download-ingenious-...

https://blog.lostartpress.com/

And if you love the look but don’t want to build it and have a spare $18k laying around, just buy one: https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/tables/dining-room-tables/...

It's like brutalism furniture design. woof.

Can it be brutalist when you have the richness of wood in full diplay, veins, shimmer and knots all apparent?

And nothing stops you to paint them or engrave them.

Is a wooden box "brutalist" too? It is a box. It is square. Is the the same as a square windowless concrete building?

> Can it be brutalist when you have the richness of wood in full display, veins, shimmer and knots all apparent?

Insofar as brutalism is about showcasing the raw building materials, yes, I think this is precisely what brutalism is about. Brutalism often uses concrete, but the big idea is to showcase the underlying material. (And if wood is more beautiful than concrete, great!)

IME, most people that complain about brutalism don't know what it is anyway and even if they roughly do, are only familiar with decades old ran down versions and not the original vision.

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