By Roger Green
MIDLAND — Tubular metal chairs, linoleum floors and other domestic staples are products of the Bauhaus, an influential German design school in
operation from 1919-33. Today, the Chicago Bauhaus continues the original’s penchant for tiptop craftsmanship, an exhibit of wooden furniture shows.
“Lasting Values: Berthold Schwaiger and the Chicago Bauhaus” brings a collection of splendid, one-of-a kind furniture items to the Midland Center for the Arts through Sept. 10. Schwaiger, a German-born master craftsman, immigrated to this country in 1984. His Chicago Bauhaus Academy, a woodworking facility encompassing some 5,000-square-feet, offers one of the few apprenticeship programs for serious woodworkers in the United States.
In fact, Schwaiger’s apprentices, following his designs, created most of the tables, chairs, dressers, benches and wall units on view. Their technical handling, as would be expected, is superb.
So are Schwaiger’s designs, which exhibit two distinct personalities. Some items are organic-appearing, their curvilinear parts linked by complex joinery. Other pieces, rectangular and sleek, incorporate influences from sophisticated — read, hairy — mathematical principles. In both instances, proportions are handsome, while wood grain is exposed — often juxtaposed — with dazzling effect. Schwaiger eschews stains and finishes, prefering to hand-sand wood surfaces to satiny finishes.
The “Schwaiger Chair” and more especially Schwaiger’s “Triple Helix Table” are illustrative. The graceful, skeletal chair, minimal but strong, curves with the body’s contours. Its shaped, cherry parts are linked by mortise and tenon joinery and by splines (wooden wafers inserted into slotted board ends).
Schwaiger’s “Triple Helix Table” balances a transparent, glass disk on a three-part, maple base, likewise showing mortise and tenon joinery and splines. The base’s curved arms. tapering inward at a 35-degree angle, intersect at a central, horizontal hub. The impression is active and fluid.
Very different are Schwaiger’s boxy but harmoniously proportioned “Progressive Dresser” and “Fibonacci Chest.” The dresser, of catalpa and oak, owes the size and disposition of its parts to the trigonometry of the quarter circle, with a diminishing depth from bottom to top. The chest, of cherry and purple heart, uses proportions based on the Fibonacci Series.
The Fibonacci Series? That’s a numerical progression, described in the 13th century by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. The series begins with zero and one, then adds the two latest numbers to get the following number; thus, the progession 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5. 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on, ad infinitum. Over years, Fibonacci and others have applied the series to many phenomena, including the breeding of rabbits and appearance of spiral patterns in snails. Schwaiger’s “Fibonacci Chest” continues that intellectual game.
The chest and other works also are environmentally responsible, Schwaiger reminds viewers. “Look at the longevity of the product,” he says in a statement comparing his own works to cheaper, mass-produced items made from panels of particle and fiber. “They usually get tossed into a landfill after some years, while the Chicago Bauhaus piece constructed out of solid wood will last for generations to come.”
Amen.
