The Science of Studio Craftsmanship

I built my last pipe organ, and then moved to Minnesota with the intention of building up a new workshop that would allow me to explore the concepts of studio fine art woodworking in more detail. Most people envision the type of woodworking studio I wanted to build up as the kind that one finds built out of an old farm building far away from a large urban environment, full of old wooden floors, and with hand tools of all sorts hung from the walls. The type of old world workshop with a large workbench or two where one works wood with planes and chisels.

That was my intention. As my workshop builds up, the opposite is happening though. I have begun to employ ever more sophisticated computer design tools, and in parallel built a shop around innovative stationary and benchtop machinery employed in an adaptive workstation environment all to accommodate an increasingly diverse set of processes I now use to build an increasingly diverse set of object design.

I am building object design based on product platform architecture. This is another contemporary concept that might actually not be so far removed from old world craftsmanship if one reviews the extant pipe organ examples of the Baroque organ builder Gottfried Silbermann.

So if someone asks what's he building in there, be sure that it will be some combination of old world and new world craftsmanship. Design making a visual statement, with function and purpose.