“I came home with a high fever; my ears still hurt. Just from the noise --- a ringing in my ears. It is very toxic. But it’s Houston.”
Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright is describing the after effects of Sunday’s Furniture Sale on North Freeway (announced last week on OffCite), a daylong event at the abandoned Landmark Chevrolet dealership on Interstate 45. Presented by wacdesignstudio, which consists of husband-wife team Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn, the guerilla retail event launched the studio’s first furniture line, designed and fabricated with an attention to the modesty of scale, materials, and production.
Located outside the crumbling remains of the Landmark Chevrolet Dealership, “Furniture Sale on North Freeway” reflected on the unanticipated failures of highly leveraged businesses and their effects on the city landscape.
The happening attracted about 50 people who had received mailed flyers, picked up information from Catalina Coffee, or began following the studio on Twitter. Because the space was not rented, Scott and Jenny brought an envelope full of cash to pay off potential security guards (there were none), as well as food for any wandering homeless people. The crowd was a mix of architecture students, writers, and curious locals from the adjacent Hidden Valley ranch-style development located behind the dealership. For Scott and Jenny, bringing the intelligentsia outside of their element to the edge city and putting the locals’ neighborhood eyesore to use was just as relevant as displaying their wares.
Mr. Cartwright grew up in the midst of the Woodlands McMansion boom. His father owned a custom cabinetry company, to which Scott owes much of his sense of craftsmanship, as well as keen sense of economy of material. Scott met Jenny, a native of Caracas, while both were studying at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. When the couple came back to Houston upon graduation, Scott found that his native Woodlands had been almost completely built out, leaving a dismantled craft construction industry in its wake. The Cartwrights chose to interpret the recession on their own terms, founding a hyper-local design studio focusing on the discourse of contemporary art and its relationship to design and architecture.
They define their “design art” as any artwork that attempts to play with the place, function, and style of art by commingling it with architecture, furniture, and graphic design. The forms are simple and composed of repossessed construction materials. Explains the duo, “It is more about the objects than about comfort and pop, we are currently not designing furniture to please anyone or solve other people's problems, we are designing and building furniture as a way to find the answers to/and/or compare them to global and local issues concerning the current state of the economy and capitalism.”
Though no pieces were sold, the show on the North Freeway created a dialogue with the community on the failure of high leverage business, massive turnout, and mediocre quality goods versus the idea of a low leverage business, locally built, and individually handcrafted. In the long run, wacdesignstudio believes that this model will be the standard for creating a sustainable, growth-oriented local economy.
