Chair-ness - Wjerk: A Climate Design Studio

Christopher Attenborough and I have built 16 chairs so far, one per work session, from whatever’s left in the shop. Thirteen are on view at Union Craft Brewing in Baltimore.

We started in May 2026, mostly to use up the old material piling up in Chris’s shop, which sits in the same warehouse complex as Union. It was also a joke. A Yelp review had complained that the Union taproom didn’t have enough places to sit.

There are three rules. A chair has to work, it has to be safe, and it has to be finished in one session.

Under the rules sits the real question. What makes a chair? How do you know when you’ve made one? What’s a chair for? How little can you use and still have one? Is a stool a chair? Is a bench a chair? Is stool-ness a subset of chair-ness? Craftspeople have chased the perfect chair for centuries, in bent wood, plastic, metal tubing, textiles and stone. We chase it with whatever turns up: shop scraps and roadside finds.

So far, the least material went into a stool I made, held together with traditional joinery. Overall, though, Chris’s chairs run leaner than mine.

Two didn’t even make it to the floor, because we decided they weren’t safe. The rest went out to the taproom, and two weeks later one was already back in the shop for repairs.

Beside the chairs runs a loop of chair history: museum pieces, quotes and whatever else the research turned up, drawn from the chair-ness channel on Are.na.

The shop isn’t empty yet.

A low slatted table, a tall plywood chair, a slim pale chair and a three-legged stool on splayed dowel legs, in front of a green wall — A four-legged stool on splayed dowel and old broom handle legs

A white plywood box stool, a log stool banded in blue and two plywood chairs, one with a gray cushion, around a slatted table — A box stool and a sort of beer stein/barrel stool around a slatted table

A red upholstered cube stool, a pale plywood chair and a small splay-legged stool under the Union Craft Brewing sign — A red bent plywood stool under the Union Craft Brewing sign

A red rounded stool, a low dark table, a tall plywood chair, and smaller pale wood chairs and stools beside the taproom’s events board — Pale plywood chairs and stools by the events board

Chairs and stools grouped on a stained concrete floor under the bar’s colored lights, with a vending machine behind them — Under the bar’s lights

An office-chair base topped with a round wooden seat, a slatted table, a milk-crate stool and two chairs in front of the plank wall — An office-chair base with a round wooden seat