Waffle chef-in-residence Stephen Akbeg 08S has been featured in two articles: one on the Hampshire website, and one in the Chronicle of Higher Education! Also interviewed in the first article is HCLC Director Colin Twitchell. Read the Hampshire web article here and the Chronicle of Higher Education article here.
Archive for December, 2009
Putting an End to the Awful Waffle: Stephen Akbeg
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Alum Wilson Kemp’s Band Featured in Review
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Alum Wilson Kemp talks about circuit bending at Hampshire and observing the spectrum of time in the Washington City Paper’s review of “Five Minutes at the Rainforest Cafe”, a release by his band Macaw. For the full review and a sample of Kemp’s sound, visit the Washington City Paper site.
Journeyman: An Interview with Alum Jacob Lefton
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009The Blacksmith played a vital role in society for centuries, being as everyday a fixture as a doctor or a carpenter. With the advent of the Industrial Age, the village blacksmith became less visible, even fading from the community altogether. However, the trade has been seeing a quiet resurgence over the last century as people seek to reconnect with their past, learn a time-honored skill, or own a hand crafted, unique creation, fashioned by man instead of factory.
This blacksmithing revival is not just occurring in the United States. Alum Jacob Lefton has spent much of the past year travelling throughout Europe, attending blacksmithing festivals, apprenticing in shops, and talking to smiths from the far reaches of the continent. What he discovered on his journey was a vibrant cultural tapestry, infused with the traditions of many countries and held together by fire and metal.
Jacob uses the gas forge during a recent visit to the Lemelson Center.
While still a student at Hampshire, Jacob heard about an annual artist blacksmith festival in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, which unfortunately always took place during finals week. Following graduation, Jacob emailed the festival organizers, and they invited him to attend. He was also offered an apprenticeship with a blacksmith in Crimea, on the other side of the country. Leaving in the spring of 2009, Jacob arrived in Ukraine and immediately met up with Finnish, Belgian and English blacksmiths. Following the festival, Jacob toured several cities, meeting about 120 smiths from 20 countries. “I got to see a lot of amazing blacksmithing work,” he said. In addition to his first apprenticeship, Jacob received many invites to work in blacksmith shops. “It was a very open and welcoming community. If you were there, you were a part of the blacksmithing family. It didn’t matter if you were a professional or not.”
Jacob worked in a total of 10 blacksmith shops, circling Europe and stopping in England, Sweden, Finland, France, and Italy. He attended several festivals, including a world forging championship in Italy. Blacksmithing apprenticeships are still practiced in places like Germany, where a journeyman smith can knock on a family’s door and receive food and lodging for the night. “It’s an integral part of the craft, because it cross pollinates it,” Lefton says of the apprenticeship system. “The techniques cross fertilize and become stronger and better. For anyone who’s looking to do blacksmithing, I highly recommend it. You have to work in other shops. You can’t work in a vacuum.”
One challenge that Jacob encountered was the language barrier. “It was exciting,” he said. “I never had that before.” A creative writer, he took many notes and wrote some short fiction to keep his mind busy in places where he couldn’t speak the language. However, despite having different cultural, religious, and ideological backgrounds, the smiths were always able to find common ground in their work. “When they got together to forge, they were blacksmiths, and they had a common language.”
Lefton was impressed by the intensity with which the blacksmithing renaissance is happening in countries like Ukraine. “They’ve put in a lot of work to growing the craft and the art,” he says, noting that artistic blacksmithing declined precipitously during the Communist era, but has rebounded. “There are hundreds of blacksmith shops in a country where there was no economic incentive or support at all. There was no blacksmithing industry 20 years ago. Now it’s all over the place.”
A gate that Jacob built for a park while travelling in Ukraine.
As for his own blacksmithing goals, Jacob would like to focus on large ornamental sculpture such as gates and chandeliers. “I’ve learned how to look at and think about forged ironwork in a technical and artistic way,” he says. “I saw work that took advantage of forging in in ways I never thought possible. It really broadened my understanding of the craft.” Drawing on his literary background, he will be guest editing the Autumn 2010 issue of Artist Blacksmith, the publication put out by the British Artist Blacksmiths Association (BABA). “One of my dreams is to be able to take in apprentices and journeyman, and to support young people learning and travelling. It was really inspiring to see how this community operates.”
Student Spotlight: Benjamin Obriecht
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Anyone working in the shop over the past few weeks has noticed something different: A structure being built, then taken down, then put up again. This building-in-progress is the work of Division III student Benjamin Obriecht. The project is a teahouse, a one-room timber framed building that draws upon Japanese aesthetics and traditional American techniques.
Ben Obriecht's timber framed teahouse being assembled behind the Lemelson shop.
Genesis of the project began with Ben’s love of Japanese architecture and his background in timber framing, a building style in which larger pieces of wood are joined with physical wooden joists. The style is a contrast to light or “stick” framing, in which the pieces are butted against each other and nailed together. While stick framing, which requires less labor and craftsmanship, has become more commonplace in the building industry, there has been a steady demand for timber-framed buildings, which are stronger and display the skill of the woodworker. To obtain these skills, Ben practiced timber framing at the Heartwood School, a homebuilding school in Washington, MA.
Once he finished the design for the teahouse, Ben set out to use as much local material as he could find, repurposing timbers from the Hampshire College Farm Center CSA Barn and harvesting hemlock, pine, birch and cherry lumber from the surrounding woods. These he hewed by hand using woodworking tools like the hammer and chisel. Several of the beams were left in log form, with the bark stripped, imparting an organic feel to the shelter. “The building has a Japanese influence, but Japanese timber framing is very different from American timber framing,” said Obriecht. “This is neither purely American nor purely Japanese.” The structure will have a wraparound porch, and temporary walls will be put up for Ben’s exhibit of the teahouse in the Hampshire College Main Gallery. An advantage to a timber framed building is that it can be assembled and taken down without damaging the beams or requiring new materials.
Ben Obriecht with his timber-framed teahouse.
Following the gallery installation, Ben would like to find a permanent location for his teahouse. “I’d like to have a final location on Hampshire campus,” he said. Once the house has a home, Ben will add board or lime plaster walls. “I really like the design and the art aspect of timber framing,” he said, and observed the current backlash against Mcmansions and other cheap, mass-produced architecture. “There is definitely a value placed on a craft like timber framing. There are a lot of people who want something that was connected to a person.”
Ben’s teahouse will be on display in the Main Gallery of the Hampshire College Library from December 1-5, with a reception on December 5th at 6:00pm.