Donna and Steve Lawson of Lawson Design must have known I’m an easy mark for a good constraint. One of my favorite writing exercises, in fact, involves limiting yourself in a way that might seem to impede creativity but in fact fosters it several-fold—the most famous example being Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, written, if you can believe it, entirely without the help of the letter E. Neither does the Lawsons’ “Lamp,” made of reclaimed solid maple ply lamination, possess a single E, but the details of its development are the particular point of interest here, as they serve the Lawsons’ noble project of “Reclaiming, Reusing, and Repurposing,” in large measure, by salvaging scrap wood from school auditoriums throughout the U.S.

Lamp. Designed by Lawson Design.

A Green Lamp with a Story to Tell

Lamp’s point of genesis was the Phelps Auditorium in Camden, SC (Camden High School, 1964-2009). The precise self-imposed restrictions on the piece were as follows: 1. had to represent something of the Eastern Shore; and 2. had to be sustainable and recycled from a scrap pile from the school’s interior demolition. The hull-like shape of the school’s auditorium chairs sparked the Lawsons’ imagination and “Lamp” was born. As the Lawsons say, the piece has two major influences: the idea of a seed and its concomitant intimations of growth and harvest; and the notion of sea-faring life, invoking the ancient shapes of fishing vessels and the ribcages of whales.

The Lawsons’ Lamp stands its own ground, aesthetically speaking, yet the salvaged birds-eye maple is the more beautiful for knowing the place of its origin. The Lawsons have a special pride in the project of reclaiming a piece of the past and putting it out to greener pastures, as it were, and this Lamp shows as much in its delicacy and effervescence. The gently-arching ribs of its central structure indeed suggest the life of the sea and the burgeoning budding of the seed, deep in its soil niche. And though the Lawsons rehabilitate each slat of wood by sanitizing it and applying a hand-rubbed finish, one yet senses the history therein. Even in its new incarnation, Lamp evokes the iconic experience of the high school auditorium, which, though it manifests in many different guises with a wide range of meanings, is yet meaningful to us all.

About the Manufacturer: Steve and Donna Lawson may have begun their journey as co-designers and artists way up in Alaska, but they’ve since worked their way well south to the East Virginia shore, “where the Chesapeake Bay meets the mighty Atlantic Ocean.” Inspired by the simplicity of life in this area, the duo is currently consumed with reclaiming hardwoods from demolished school auditoriums and turning them into designs that reflect the farming and fishing culture of the region. They are frequently inspired by the elemental forms they espy within the rubble heaps of these fallen buildings: “The starting point of this work is the simple Arc. We see it in rainbows and the shoreline’s curling waves, in the Earth’s orbit, the rising moon and the setting Sun. Working with a line as simple and perfect as the arc, the designs seemed to resolve themselves in a fluid and natural way. “