A few years back (more than I can remember), my father and I made a chair out of broken hockey sticks salvaged from local ice rinks. After sketching a rough design, we cut the broken wooden sticks into the appropriate lengths, drilled holes, threaded rope through the holes, cinched them tight, and tied it all together. We were going to use a goalie stick as a headrest but the angles were not right.
Because there are no screws, the chair is actually quite comfortable - it flexes to fit your body when you sit. The chair began as a fun project, and its rustic elegance has been alluring enough for us to keep it in the family ever since - even though shoppers at my family's antique store in upstate New York, Bijou Galleries, sometimes inquire about purchasing it.
Is the Hockey Stick Chair Worldchanging? I'd never given it second thought - in fact I must admit I don't often think of the Hockey Stick Chair... until this evening when lo-and-behold it appeared like a distant memory at treehugger.com, Worldchanging.com's consumerist kin.
After a visit to beautiful Cold Spring-on-Hudson, Celine Ruben-Salama reported her discovery:
Not only is it one of a kind and really quite comfortable, it’s given some old hockey sticks and rope (probably cluttering up someone’s garage) a brand new life! Instead of ending up on a landfill the sticks continue their life in someone’s living room. Creativity combined with environmentalism! Have you seen anything like this? Did you make it? We want to know.My father and I made the chair more than 10 years ago; I am reeling from the implications of seeing it on a blog today.
Since the idyllic days when my dad and I had time enough to design and build the hockey stick chair I've been working on a myriad of exciting architectural projects which have yet to show up on a blog. Why, then, the fascination with the Hockey Stick Chair? Are environmentally focused blogs missing the big picture? Or am I? Have I abandonded simple, efficient, good design for the allure of big, green, and wasteful architecture? Has my touchstone been sitting in my parents' antique store gathering dust all these years? Perhaps Hockey Stick Chairs have as much to say to this world as does sustainable architecture.
"Reuse is the only acceptable method of production."
A little Googling reassures me that the market for hockey stick chairs, while present, is not be giving IKEA a run for their money. That a weekend project can have impact years down the road, and be interpreted in such a different way (we just thought it was a good way to use all those broken sticks) is inspiring. Here in Portland, the Rebuilding Center and furniture companies like EcoPDX demonstrate that creative reuse is alive and well.
