The perfect teapot?

Teapots have been on my mind. The videos I’d seen from Yixing of craftspeople producing them from the region’s purple clay made me want to see some at the V&A when I was in London in the fall. The quality of the surface haunted me.

In one of the hall-sized little cities of display cases I picked two favourites, tucked on the back of a shelf. To my admiration, I found every single artefact seemingly crammed into these rooms had been well-photographed, and at least the objects I was most interested in had robust catalog entries.

Regarding this lovely but fairly standard Yixing teapot, made of the darker variation of the material, the finder proudly notes the bargain she managed to negotiate on this “top quality piece”. It seems this was a lucky side quest on a trip to acquire 20th century Chinese art.

This larger teapot, though, turned out to have a very specific background. The important potter Gao Zhenyu was commissioned by the museum to make this as a replica of a teapot he’d seen as a student in Kyoto. The original belonged to Ingen Ryūki, the monk who brought green tea to Japan. I will go out on a limb and say it is hard to imagine a more perfect object.

A good teapot?

Pretty much everyone I know wants a good teapot that matches the way they drink tea. Personally, I won’t pretend I’m making tea “properly” most of the time. For me, an everyday teapot is mostly for brewing big batches of verveine or buckwheat tea to warm up in the evening. Good green tea is a whole other thing. For some reason the only proper teapots I’ve owned have been made of metal, bought secondhand when I lived in the Netherlands. The one I still use is an aluminum camping model, and austere as it is I like pretty much everything about it — the shape, the handle, the capacity, the pour — except that it predictably doesn’t hold heat well.

Otherwise I use a large tc100 jug, the only one I have with a lid. But as much as I’m a Roericht partisan, the dirty secret any fan of these things has to face is that they kind of pour like shit. The lid clatters around, then both the rounded and pointed versions of the spout used on this series inevitably drip. Whatever, I use it anyway. But the experience is far from the otherworldly smooth stream and the seamlessly ground lids in those satisfying videos from Yixing.

Besides, I had a nagging issue about using the same vessel for coffee and tea. When I was doing my rushed deep-dive in the summer finalizing my coffee filter design, I came across a distinction that stuck with me. It’s very reasonable, based on how coffee grounds and loose tea leaves generally act in water. A coffee pot’s spout should be near the top so the coffee grounds aren’t poured into the cup, while a teapot’s spout should be closer to the bottom, so floating tea leaves don’t get out.

I can’t find the source now but I swear it was from a real blog or reddit post, not an LLM. Of course, this rule isn’t really followed in practice and I found most of my friends’ teapots have the spout near the top. I guess the filtered openings to the spouts generally take care of the escaping tea leaves issue. Fine, but if I’m coming up with a new teapot design I may as well adhere to this half-remembered notion.

A teapot?

Here’s an idea I came up with yesterday, my first purely CAD design in ages without a prior reference, not beginning from a sketch let alone a physical prototype. (1)

It’s big, has thick clay walls for thermal mass, and looks kind of different in shape while sticking with mostly familiar materials.

While the surface of the fired clay is aspirationally something like Yixing pottery, the form is obviously mechanical. Another teapot that made an impression on me was the cast iron Collage design for Serax by utilise.objects and my idea draws a bit on that shape. The huge spout is probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons but I wanted to do something with that kind of (dis)proportion after seeing this kettle by John Gordon Rideout — though it clearly takes the opposite approach with respect to formal continuity and dynamism. In general, it’s fair to say my teapot looks a bit appliance-like. Fine by me.

I experimented with integrating the handle into the clay form — whether as an appendage or a cutout — but preferred to split things up in the end, resulting in another appearance of my beloved combination of metal and tobacco-stained translucent plastic. I could see the plastic here being a bit uncanny in a fun way, biotically soft, getting a bit warm.

The attachment points could probably be resolved further — the tab on the side opposite the spout has no function beyond interfacing with the handle. But it’s alright for visual balance, and matches the shape of the lid handle tab. Meanwhile the other end of the handle which crosses through the open spout is downright weird and definitely has the potential to screw up pouring, but I like the structural articulation here and the temptation to add a little pivoting cover like on a cheap coffeemaker carafe remains.

Am I really going to try running fluid simulations on this thing?

(1) I notice I feel much more constrained starting on the computer than I used to as I’ve become more established in my array of working spaces, equipment, and material. Unmediated axial geometry used to appeal to me in a way it no longer does, and the physical properties of the aforementioned spaces, tools, and materials have come to seem like a far more profound truth. Any reasonable person could tell you that, why it took me so long to get there I don’t know. Part of the break from the belief that you should function like a computer, the urgency of which only continues to heighten.