Description
In this moving account, we follow Korn’s search for meaning as an Ivy-educated child of the middle class who finds employ- ment as a novice carpenter on Nantucket, morphs into a self- employed designer/craftsman of fine furniture, takes a right turn into teaching woodworking and design at Colorado’s Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and finally founds a school in Maine: The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an interna- tionally respected, non-profit institution teaching design, furniture making, and related arts to over 400 students a year. This is not a “how-to” book in any sense. Korn wants to get at the why of craft, in particular, and at the satisfactions of creative work, in general to understand their essential nature. How does the making of objects both reflect and refine our own identities? What is it about craft and creative work that makes them so rewarding? What is the nature of those rewards? How do the products of creative work inform society?
Review
A must-read for the craftsperson, artisan and artist. “In his beautiful book, Peter Korn invites us to understand craftsmanship as an activity that connects us to others, and affirms what is best in ourselves.”
—Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
“Peter Korn writes that his work as a furniture-maker tries to accomplish three goals: integrity, simplicity, and grace. Fortunately, these qualities are also what distinguish his writing. In this book, he gives the reader an almost tangible sense of what it takes to be a creative craftsman, a homo faber, a maker of things, which is one of the central elements of the human condition. But he does much more than that: he explores what the search for self and for belonging entails in our rapidly changing times.”
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
