Pictured is a new furniture piece sharing dimensions with my Elementary Stool (in the back), but made from true leftovers: barely passable compressed sawdust product standing in for pleasant, socially democratic pine and plywood. Not far off from what’s available on the low end of the market, except missing the surface treatments and engineered connectors that otherwise make MDF products bearable.

In making this, I would be my own late-capitalist value engineer; I would be the bureaucrat in a spiralling planned economy finding marginal savings if the plattenbau walls weren’t quite so insulated and waterproofed. As far as product lifecycles go, this one would mostly likely be nasty, brutish, and short.

Not that I was fully resigned. Maybe by respecting the unvarnished reality of these dull aggregates, by working them with patience and care, they will somehow repay the favour. Or is it solely the prerogative of conscious beings to transcend limitations this ingrained? (It feels inappropriate to talk of grain in a material where it’s been so thoroughly pulverized.)

Reality sets in

I planned an upgrade of the structure compared to the Elementary series — two of the horizontal members would extend out to meet the front edges of the legs, improving their squareness.

Everything seemed to be going fine until I attempted to thread the large screws I’d bought that afternoon into the pilot holes I’d carefully drilled in the first leg’s edge. They were screwing in with suspicious ease, and sure enough, they had split the upper end of the leg fairly catastrophically.

It was after midnight so I took a sad photo of the wreckage and went to bed. Like many of these projects, it was meant to be a one-afternoon kind of deal. This was by no means an unconscionable amount of material to just throw away if I felt like moving on.

But it was gnawing at me the next morning. Skipping breakfast and even coffee (I prefer mine without sawdust) I went ahead and sawed off the protrusions from the frame that had been necessary for the “improved” structure that had resulted in the split leg.

Whatever

I’d lost confidence in the material’s ability to handle anything “clever”. The design had now regressed back to the naïve box with tacked-on legs of the Elementary series. With this came the acceptance that stability would be no better than before.

Some pilot holes on the inside of the frame would be necessary to attach reinforcing corner brackets, so I reluctantly took the big screws out. Sure enough the frame wasn’t looking so great around the screw holes, with further splits forming that I made the executive decision to ignore. Brackets in place and frame gingerly rescrewed, I felt a bit of catharsis hammering the mediocre laminate-masonite seat surface into place on top. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to just do this whole thing with nails.

I put the box on the garage floor and tentatively started to sit down, to an immediate salvo of creaking and cracking. A clear message — this will not be a stool after all.

Then what? With one leg shot, I now lacked the material to complete the piece to original stool dimensions anyway. I wasn’t going out to get more of this material that I had been trying to use up. Whatever — two of the remaining legs cut in half are fine for some sort of little table. In a mood somewhere between relief and grim inevitability, I stick them on the sides with three nails each.

It’s heavy, it’s not entirely sturdy, it will gather plenty of coffee rings on its porous surface. It will likely break when an innocent visitor ends up sitting on it. But I suspect its low, childlike proportions could give it a a better chance at survival based on dubious evolutionary-psychology notions of cuteness.

Getting comfortable

I think many perfect forms for a stool are possible. (Thanks to Louise for the following illustrations.)

A Thonet grows rickety with dignity.

Aalto’s model 60 is so solid that even the knockoffs are more than good enough.

Thélonious Goupil’s Good Luck stool is immediately elegant but might appear formally affected, until you realize why it needs to look precisely that way.

David Searcy’s Crimp stool feels inevitable and yet didn’t materialize until long after the standardization of aluminum tubes, rods, and sheets.

Lisa Norinder’s Benjamin stool is one of the friendliest forms a piece of plywood could take.

Its ancestor, the Ulm stool, is ambiguous enough in its minimalism that it becomes a kind of universally applicable surface. Yet it is specific to its setting, its design tailored to the capabilities of that school’s workshop.

This isn’t even getting into anonymous models: the workshop stool, inclusive and accessible by virtue of its adjustability; or the low Istanbul sidewalk café stools that seem to help people stay unusually flexible by Western standards as they age.

The Elementary series of stools which begat this chipboard appendix doesn’t really master any of these qualities. Their construction methodology isn’t fully resolved or honestly expressed, you wouldn’t necessarily feel safe standing on one, and they aren’t the epitome of aesthetic elegance. But they’ve been around for a few months now and have been fairly useful around the house. We’ll find out soon what this compromised reinterpretation can manage.