wood
I would like to make solid wood clocks if the opportunity came up. I like glue, and I like to cut with saws.
“Bob Dylan in Conversation with John Elderfield,” Spring 2011.
Solid wood has almost disappeared as too expensive, complicated and old-fashioned. I reintroduced it as a construction method here because it feels good to be with, to be in. You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin—the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn’t steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it’s hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it’s cold, the other way around. So I preserved the wood-beam construction because of what it can do for your body.
“The Ascension of Peter Zumthor,” by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2011.
I knew from the very first that some day there would be a cow here. One of the first things that turned up when we bought the place was a milking stool, an old one, handmade, smooth with the wax finish which only the seat of an honest man’s breeches can give to wood.
“Getting Ready for a Cow,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 315.
The most interesting thing about wood for me is that it has a grain, as people do. That is, each piece of wood has a personality and, as we know from our relationships with people—trying to work with them, live with them—personality could almost be defined by the way resistance (to what I want) is expressed in it. In wood the recalcitrance of the grain, little whorls and eddies like cowlicks that won’t be combed down, the fixed expressions of its accustomed shape, give each piece of wood its own face. Resistance is only resistance, however, in reaction to a force brought to bear on it—there would be no resistance if I weren’t there chopping away with chisel and mallet. Everyone is easy to get along with if you let him have his own way, but there is no relationship without difficulties. In like manner the wood resists me, it resists my plans for it, and it does so in a way that is particular to it, so that the relationship is always personal.
Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft (London: Arkana, 1986), 87.