New Box for New York

Recent projects present the chance to develop further both Hand Werk and Make Do Type. I'm designing variants of Make Do for a typographic setting of six poems which discuss daylight saving and the seasonal clock change to come, for the New York Times Op-Ed section. More on that soon. Shown here is prototyping for a new Hand Werk box, in conjunction with –and to be shown in– Partners & Spade's store on Great Jones St., NYC., thanks to the continuously inspiring Andrew.

Shown is the base layer, with a wider palette of materials, including raw hide leather and hardwoods; more acute use of naturally varying thicknesses to force where pieces double stack as a corrective to bring about an even height. Also to make sense of the two directions which had evolved without my ever standing back; the stacking or permutational and the tool– or gamepiece– like.

The box is longer, to house both these pieces and the petri dish as used in an earlier variant. The dimensions partly come from this envelope, a found, horded element to be included. I picked these up 12 years ago, during my time in Brussels. The colourtone, thin stock and proportion registered then and do now.

The box itself went through several stages but the consistent aim was to have an external akin to the internal. So a plywood inside-out structure, with no clear top or bottom. The one-two-three-four jointing came after numerous experiments with finger joints but this held the right balance of clean and odd.

So there are tallies and harmonies in stacked heights and slots throughout.

Also use of silicone rubber, as a plug, a stopper, a band, a brick.

The end piece, shown in the top image of the post and again here, dictates moments where an interior piece has to slot flush into the apertures. So it becomes a key for, a swatch of, the substances therein.

I have always (and I really mean always) loved Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1954)(via), specifically its rhythmical window compositions. Certainly aware of this when designing the apertures, with cryptic alignments. The next stage will be a small unbound bookwork of granular endpaper-prints, to sit atop the stacking pieces.