John Wardle

It's all done.

Yeah, all ready and waiting.

Ash, Ash, see?

It's Tasmanian blackwood.

Of course, you'd be using local tools.

And he spends the week telling the story of the Windsor chair and how it went to America and the different way they make it.

But I thought we'd be just feeding things into a lathe for the week.

No, no, every spindle, right around the back of it and all the legs, there's one rectangular section of timber where we had spoke shaves to change the radiuses down the length of it.

To taper it.

The tapers, and they're different tapers, the top to the bottom.

Like, unbelievable.

And the trigonometry of the legs set out and the spindles and things.

God, I did my head in.

I went back to work happily the next week.

Well, I think I like the stories and the kind of humanity that you see in an object.

And when we were a younger practice and didn't have the capacity to initiate design in collaboration with others, it was my collecting from our trips overseas and op shops and junkyards and things.

What fascinated me, particularly when we travelled, was obviously the aesthetic value of the object, but I was just always intrigued by who made it and where and what era it was and what the cultural imperatives were and the technologies that sat behind that object.

And so it's always been that understanding of why and how and by who it was made that sits ahead of the object itself.

Yeah, I think it snuck up on me.

My first job as a young architect, I met a guy called Greg Peter, amazing steel fabricator down at Moorabbin.