Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Design

Antoinette LaFarge

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030323400
• eBook ISBN: 9783030323417
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

During the Progressive Era, a time when the field of design was dominated almost entirely by men, a largely forgotten activist and teacher named Louise Brigham became a pioneer of sustainable furniture design. With her ingenious system for building inexpensive but sturdy "box furniture" out of recycled materials, she aimed to bring good design to the urban working class. As Antoinette LaFarge shows, Brigham forged a singular career for herself that embraced working in the American and European settlement movements, publishing a book of box furniture designs, running carpentry workshops in New York, and founding a company that offered some of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture in the United States. Her work was a resounding critique of capitalism's waste and an assertion of new values in design—values that stand at the heart of today's open and green design movements.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. LaFargeLouise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Designhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32341-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Adventures of a Scrap Artist

Antoinette LaFarge¹

(1)

University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

Antoinette LaFarge

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The Progressive Era designer and social activist Louise Brigham spent a pivotal summer on the far-northern island of Spitsbergen in the early 1900s developing her system for building box furniture out of recycled packing crates. This chapter considers how a young, well-to-do Boston woman came to be in this remote spot in 1906 (then known to Europeans mainly as a jumping-off point for polar exploration), what life was like in the Arctic Coal Company mining camp where she stayed, and how she went about her work there. Following this is an examination of how women like Brigham came to be largely written out of standard histories of design through a combination of gender bias and devaluation of the social aspects of design that were prominent in Brigham’s box furniture project.

Keywords

Louise BrighamSpitsbergenBox furnitureArctic Coal Company

End Abstract

“Two summers on the island of Spitzbergen ,” wrote the Progressive Era designer Louise Brigham in 1909, “taught me, more than all previous experiments, the latent possibilities of a box.” ¹ The book she published that year, Box Furniture, is indeed a testament to the possibilities of a box—and not just any box, but specifically the packing crates then used to ship all kinds of ordinary consumer goods. Brigham found in those humble, cheaply made boxes inspiration for a unique system of furniture design based entirely on recycled packing crates.

The first of those two summers was 1906. The American journalist and explorer Walter Wellman had set up headquarters on Danes Island in the Svalbard archipelago, more than 800 miles above the Arctic Circle. From there he would launch several attempts to reach the North Pole by dirigible. He failed in these (as in several later ones), his efforts thwarted by a combination of bad planning and mechanical failures. He will nonetheless be counted among a haloed group of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arctic and Antarctic adventurers: Salomon Andrée, Umberto Nobile, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen—all of whom also launched expeditions from the northern fringe of Svalbard. Wellman’s grandiosity marks him as a devotee of what has been termed the “polar imaginary,” a field for the inscriptions of ambitious men, regardless of whether they set out for the frigid zones in person or, like the artist Frederic Church, set down their visions of the icy sublime in paint.

That summer of 1906, members of Wellman’s team met a quite different sort of American adventurer: Louise Brigham, who was spending a few months on Spitsbergen, Svalbard’s largest island. It was an odd place for a young woman from Boston to find herself, even given the fact that well-to-do New Englanders of the period often took a puritanical attitude toward their vacations, believing that moral fiber would be developed through privation and physical challenge. Brigham was 31 that summer and single; her parents were long dead. She was there with friends, but in certain essential ways, she was also alone: there was no family to offer comfort and support, no cohort of competitors to drive her on, no band of women to normalize her presence. Her peers were mostly at home, many of them already married and raising children. So her presence in this Norwegian outpost on the edge of the Arctic Ocean suggests a person of some courage and imagination. When Louise returns to the United States, it will be with none of the glamor and acclaim that attended Wellman and the other Arctic explorers of the day. Yet during this sojourn, she explored and developed an idea whose legacy is still playing out today, even though Brigham herself is all but unknown.

Louise Brigham came home from that summer on Spitsbergen to develop an entire program for building furniture out of salvaged packing crates. She wrote out her ideas in the book Box Furniture , which made her briefly famous. She championed this system as an economical way for the working poor to afford good design, as a way of reskilling city dwellers, and as a shining example of American thriftiness. She also started a mail-order business to sell kits of ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture direct to consumers. In all of these activities, she exemplified the Progressive Era ethos while still pushing ahead of her contemporaries on a number of fronts. Her aesthetic was rough-hewn and starkly rectilinear at a time when the reigning styles were versions of elegant simplicity: Art Nouveau and its Germanic counterpart Jugendstil, the American Craftsman and Prairie School styles, the Vienna Secession. In certain respects, her work anticipates by a decade the plainer geometries of De Stijl, and it will be nearly three decades before furniture based on recycled materials enters the realm of high design through Dutch De Stijl designer Gerrit Rietveld’s Crate Chair . ² Her mail-order furniture kits represent a rare step toward an industry that would not take off until the late 1940s. And today, several prominent areas of contemporary design trace directly back to, or through, Brigham’s project: especially recycled-materials design , low-impact design, do-it-yourself design , multifunctional design , and modular design . In her commitment to an open practice and craftsmanship by amateurs, she has a great deal in common with the open source movement in design. Indeed, it would not be too much to call her a progenitor of the sustainable design movement.

To understand Louise Brigham, we must begin by delving further into that first summer on Spitsbergen. The island’s name—“pointed mountains” in Dutch—neatly describes its geology. Roughly triangular, about 100 miles wide by 150 long, it is so riven by fjords that it resembles a giant piece of rocky lace. In summer, when Brigham was there, it warms up to around 40 degrees Fahrenheit and is often foggy. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century it was visited mainly by fur hunters and whalers, the latter of whom might do a little opportunistic coal mining on the side. The major nation-states of the northern hemisphere considered Svalbard terra nullius—no one’s land, open for exploitation by all and un-ownable by any—but that tacit agreement began to fray during the heyday of European whaling and would be erased by the Svalbard Treaty of 1920. ³ Toward the end of the nineteenth century, coal mining began in earnest and has since remained one of Spitsbergen’s main industries (lately supplemented by tourism and scientific research).

One of the island’s first large-scale mining developers was John Munro Longyear, a Minnesotan who had already made a fortune on mining claims in the Lake Superior region before he formed a partnership to buy land claims on Spitsbergen beginning in 1904. ⁴ (On the scale of wealth, John Munro Longyear existed in a universe where he could dismantle a mansion he had built in Wisconsin, transship its pieces 1300 miles to eastern Massachusetts, and rebuild it even larger—a feat so extreme in its day that it made it into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.) ⁵ By 1906, Longyear and his partner had established the Arctic Coal Company to mine claims on Ice Fjord, which cuts deep into the west coast of Spitsbergen, nearly bisecting the island. Longyear made his nephew, William Dearborn Munroe, the company’s general manager. ⁶ Brigham arrived on Spitsbergen aboard Longyear’s yacht as a guest of Munroe and as a companion for his wife, prepared to spend the summer in the newly founded mining camp on Arctic Coal Company Tract No. 1. ⁷ Located in a small valley on the south shore of Ice Fjord, at the foot of one of its many finger bays, the camp was then known by the glorified title of Longyear City and today is called Longyearbyen (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Map of the Arctic Sea region with the Svalbard archipelago at upper left. Inset: central Spitsbergen showing Ice Fjord, where Louise Brigham spent two summers in the mining camp of Longyear City

A century later, Longyearbyen is the largest settlement in the archipelago, with a population hovering around 2000 people. When Brigham was there, however, its population consisted mainly of Svalbard reindeer, Arctic foxes, and migratory seabirds, accented by a few isolated clumps of coal miners. Polar bears, too, abound on Spitsberg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Adventures of a Scrap Artist
• 2. The Limits of Education
• 3. Box Furniture
• 4. The Social Program
• 5. The Home Thrift Association
• 6. Ready-to-Assemble Furniture
• 7. Vanishing Act
• 8. Caycean Disciple
• 9. The Contemporary Context
• Back Matter