One Day Lectern / The Exchange

Not long after I started work at The Exchange, a visiting speaker requested a lectern; somewhere to put those nervous hands as well as to hold notes.

Often, as furniture makers, we’ll spend weeks or months on a single object. This was designed and built in a day, with the help of one of The Exchange’s volunteer makers. While it’s often necessary to invest a serious amount of time to create objects of quality, sometimes it can be fun (and useful) to take what you’ve learned, move quickly, and see what happens.

When the lectern was finished, a colleague popped their head around the workshop door, and said, “nice, very post-modern; it looks like an Ionic column”. And then I remembered being in Tarbert with friends, a month earlier, and seeing a half-comic, half-mysterious image; only the top-most portion of an Ionic column, placed next to the bay, positioned to look like, maybe, the rest of the thing was buried. A glimpse of an imaginary ruin.