This cabinet is a fairly direct copy of the first piece I built at College of the Redwoods- aside the wood used and having been built with metric instead of imperial measurements, it is basically the same. When FW first approached me to write an article about that cabinet, I was hesitant: it's a complicated piece, but more than that, I was worried about giving away something that wasn't mine to share, or claiming ownership over something that had been developed and refined by hundreds of people before me. So, my hope was to convey as best I could the notion that this cabinet was a direct result of my time at CR, and not just something I cooked up out of thin air. It is work that would in no way exist without the work of others.
I don't know if I could say I enjoyed building this cabinet. Honestly, between writing the article and building three or four separate sets of parts, it kind of made my brain melt. But it did give me a chance to consider my time at CR, and what it has meant to me over the last ten years or so. I use what I learned in that program nearly every single day. To me, the school's method, whether intentional or not, is more of an approach than an aesthetic; it's a lens through which to view a problem. You develop a set of tools, rather than a list of answers. It is what, I think, any kind of education should aspire to. All of this is to say that although this cabinet was a difficult build, there is a joy to knowing where it came from. Onward and upward.
