The Korn Identity

Peter Korn is an award-winning furniture maker, the founder and director of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, and
a respected writer in the craft. He grew up in Philadelphia, attended Quaker schools, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in history before he ever handled a tool or a piece of wood.

Korn’s journey with woodworking began at a job after college framing houses; he had moved on to finish work before he taught himself how to design and make furniture. Whenever he needed a new skill, he selected a project that demanded he acquire it until he was designing and building, exhibiting, and winning awards.

Over the years Korn has taught in the workshop setting as well as at universities, written magazine articles and a column on woodworking for The Chicago Tribune. Taunton Press has published two of his books on woodworking, Woodworking Basics: Mastering the Essentials of Craftsmanship and The Woodworker’s Guide to Hand Tools.

Sixteen years ago he established the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in a small barn behind his house, and in that first year taught seven two-week sessions of six students each, and put them up and fed them in his home.

Although the center is now a nonprofit organization with a 12-acre campus with four buildings along the Oyster River, with expansive programs, scholarships, and an endowment, it continues to maintain its original six-to-one student–teacher ratio and its commitment to creating a community of people in love with wood and what it can become. Renowned furniture makers and woodworkers come to teach students from all over Maine and the world. Its Messler Gallery is the only year-round gallery north of Washington, D.C., dedicated to the exhibition of all wood forms: sculpture, carving, marquetry, turning, and furniture. Its exhibitions travel internationally.

Today, Korn makes a few pieces a year, still in the domestic hardwoods he loves—cherry, walnut, maple, ash—because “they’re readily available and less ecologically destructive to harvest than any of the tropical hardwoods.” His vision of a minimalist shop would include a nice band saw and all his hand tools.

For Korn, furniture making was how he began to understand himself in the world, and he continues to see the creative process as “a gauntlet you enter, full-well expecting to come out on the other side feeling differently about yourself. No one,” he says, “writes a book or makes a piece of furniture because the world needs another book or another piece of furniture. I don’t think that’s why the work comes into being. Making is a process of self-discovery.”

Furniture is such an integral part of our daily lives. When you look back at your childhood years, do you have any awareness of how furniture fits into that picture?

We had quite a bit of interesting furniture in my house, like an old Italian chest with a painted scene on the side my mother’s father bought, but I had no interest in it at all. I didn’t realize how much the furniture I grew up with was ingrained in my mind until I started making it.

How did you get involved in furniture making?

After college, I moved to Nantucket Island in search of real life. The first job I got was as a carpenter. I didn’t know anything. My dad was a lawyer, my mother was an historian—I majored in history and thought I would be a public-service-type lawyer doing good in the world. It was very much a family about working with your mind, and not with your hands.

Let’s go back to that phrase, “real life.” What do you mean?

I just had a suspicion that there was a real life I hadn’t been exposed to—one that seemed more holistic, although I wouldn’t have known that word back then. The sort of life that mainstream, middle-class America was living—in the context of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement—seemed morally shallow and bankrupt. In retrospect, my peers and I tended to be looking for a life that might be more meaningful.

Can you remember one of the first pieces of furniture you ever made?

I know the first thing I ever made. I was 23 and caretaking a 200-year-old Cape on Nantucket, and a rusty table saw was in the barn. It was three or four days before Thanksgiving and some friends were having a baby any day now. They were my first friends to have a child, so it was a really great mystery to everyone. I decided to make them a cradle as a present—from a picture in a book—in that unheated barn. My fingers were numb, but I was so focused, and at the end of three days there was this really—to me—beautiful object. It changed my life.

You’re self-taught. How did you do that?

I knew so little that it was only by making a piece that I discovered what it was I needed to learn next, so I kept designing a piece that incorporated the skill I needed next, like turning or shaping or mortise and tenon joints.

How do you describe the furniture you create?

I described it when I was very actively making as trying to make work that from my point of view had the qualities of integrity and simplicity and grace. You might describe it as kind of Shaker meets modernism meets Japanese.

Actually I was thinking clean and open—even that bench you made last year.

Yes, clean and open works. Although I see my new work as more relaxed and playful. Furniture making was for a long time the way in which I created my own identity. It was a form of creative engagement—which is how I think people find fulfillment in life, through actually making the world a different place in some way, whether it’s creatively engaged in science, in teaching, in business. It’s using your own experience as a crucible to find new ways of mentally ordering or understanding or shaping the world, which then gets shared with everyone. It’s the nature of humanity.

You said “was.” What changed?

For one thing, I started the school and realized that running the school was another form of creative engagement. Instead of interacting with wood, I’m building a community of people around certain common values. And for another, I write. Really the thing that’s interested me for the last 15 or 20 years is why people make stuff. And so I’m trying to write intelligently about the topic of why craft matters.

Why start a school?

I was running the major workshop program for furniture making in the country. The type of woodworking I personally enjoyed, which was making unabashedly useful and beautiful furniture, was really looked down on. I wanted to make a place, a center, an institution that supported the idea that making functional, beautiful work was an important exploration of the human spirit.

Is all the work here functional?

Oh, no. If you go in the gallery right now, you won’t see one “functional” piece there, but it’s all valid and beautiful and compelling.

Writers often talk about their “voice.” Does that apply to furniture making, too?

Completely. Here’s how I understand voice. When I started to make furniture, every single step of the way was a decision. If I was trying to figure out the edge of this tabletop, I’d have to figure out what shape? How hard a corner? Break the edge? How to break the edge? How soft? Use a rasp, a file, sandpaper, what grit, a sanding block? Does the sanding block have a hard face or a soft face? So that’s just for the stupid edge of this little table. Imagine that multiplied by about 10,000 for the whole piece. In the beginning they are all conscious decisions and the movement doesn’t flow. Over time you establish your preferences and the aggregate of those million small decisions becomes your voice. Your mind and your hand are singing from the same choir book.

How do you know if a design is successful?

You have to ask yourself two things: Does it satisfy the intent of the designer? And was the intent worth pursuing in the first place?

And that’s a designer of…

Anything.