Anybody Can Do Anything: Evan Fay on the Freedom of Design Constraints

By Jake Yuzna

Dec 19, 2023

Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Houses of Ideas

Evan Fay in their studio, 2023. Photo by Kam Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Having discovered furniture design by way of a watercolor-painting class for architects, Michigan-born and -based designer Evan Fay creates bold furniture that mix playful fabrication techniques with an artist’s intuition for form and function. With their work a part of Idea House 3, Fay sat down to discuss the freedom in design constraints and what Detroit’s ghost gardens can tell us about not holding back.

Jake Yuzna

Where did you grow up?

Evan Fay

I’m originally from Traverse City, Michigan, which is about four hours north of here [Detroit]. Born and raised in Michigan.

JY

What brought you to Detroit?

EF

When I was in Traverse City, I started to think that I was going to go into architecture. That made me explore a career in architecture and that educational path, through which I discovered furniture design. Before that, I didn’t even know furniture design existed.

That led me to do my undergraduate studies at Kendall College of Art and Design [of Ferris State University] in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the furniture program focuses on traditional furniture-making. Afterward, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. A lot of my cohorts were moving to High Point, North Carolina, where the furniture industry in the States is mass-produced. I knew I didn’t want to do that, so I was trying to buy myself more time, honestly. A few professors at Kendall turned me on to the graduate program at Cranbrook [Academy of Art]. I was accepted into that program and, after graduating, I chose to stay in the area and start to build my furniture studio practice here as opposed to going to New York, L.A., or Chicago. Being from Michigan, it seemed like a good fit to stay.

JY

How did discovering furniture design take place for you?

EF

I was working in a watercolor class in order to fulfilling prerequisites for an architecture degree, and my professor there took note of some of the work I was doing. They started to ask me questions like, “Have you ever thought about more of a product design avenue rather than architecture?” At that time, I was maybe expressing some of my frustrations with the educational path of architecture. Once I discovered product design, it was a better fit for me already because I was already making furniture in my mom’s garage. I found hacking pieces together really fun, and I was doing that on the side anyways. The idea that I could make that into a career made me really excited.

JY

Cranbrook looms large over object and furniture design, especially in the Midwest. What was your experience there like?

EF

Cranbrook is like a weird fantasy place that operates outside of the normal constraints of art and design, or at least how we think about art and design. It has a really rich history of this. It is hard to describe if you’ve never been there. Cranbrook is a physical place, but it is also an attitude and mentality toward studio art or design that goes against the grain and is different than any other educational experience that I’m familiar with.

Basically, you go there for two years, and you are supported by artists, mentors, and students alike who are all working toward this common goal of developing a studio practice, but doing it in a way that is free from the typical way of education. Cranbrook is a place that people go to discover themselves, discover their paths, and discover really what they want to do. That is what it was for me also. I spent my undergrad learning seating heights, good proportion, and the “right way” to do things. At Cranbrook, there was an approach of, “Forget all of that and start over.” Which is really refreshing.

JY

Where you influenced by other approaches outside of what you found at Cranbrook?

EF

Between my first and second year at Cranbrook, I studied with a Dutch design studio in the Netherlands, called Kiki and Joost. That really shifted my idea about what a successful studio practice can look like.  Their studio was so fun and freeing to work in while making really high-level work. That experience shed light on a different way to go about a studio practice that wasn’t so agonized over.

When I returned to Cranbrook for my second year, I kept what I learned in the Netherlands in the back of my head when I was thinking about my thesis project. This led me to create a system of thinking rather than specific pieces. I wanted to produce a train of thought that could produce an infinite number of projects or variations.

JY

How does that system of thinking work?

EF

These systems of thinking are a bit of defining design constraints. This allows my work to be produced within a set of constraints so that I can create an infinite number of iterations within a unified design language that I’ve defined.

Rather than trying to design an upholstered chair, I wanted to develop systems of creating a collection of furniture that could be an ongoing series, without necessarily an end. Furniture that could be sculpted in an infinite number of ways. I wanted to ensure this [would be] a gratifying process that included physically make something with my hands [and] would create very expressive furniture that had a strong statement in an interior.

With the Lawless collection, it was about how to intuitively combine two components, frame and foam, together to create more expressive or sculptural furniture. The Lawless pieces can function as furniture but take more of the fine artist’s approach. I’m intentionally making these pieces that are intended to support the human body, but they can accomplish this through infinite iterations.

This approach lets me make functional objects, but do it in a way that maybe is closer related to how a painter would work in a studio: working within a set of design constraints but allowing a freeness of form and intuitive thinking to build the final result. When I’m making these pieces, it’s really a one-to-one activity, where I’m physically intertwining the foam to be supportive for the human body. It’s this weird meta thing: I’m making furniture with my body, for another body, using my body. When I’m making the works, I’m testing the comfort of them, while also getting up to look at them from afar to see if it creates the right look or statement I want to make.

JY

Do you find those constraints freeing?

EF

I find creating constraints and limitations to be really freeing, actually. Basically, I’m setting up parameters that define or help guide the decision-making. I get to work more intuitively within this predefined system that I’ve already made up.

For example, the base structure of the Lawless sofa is 90-degree angles: right angles that combine pipe steel together and allow me to work freely with my hands to build the pieces one-to-one in physical space. It allows me to react to it and make changes in the moment, rather than designing everything within a drawing and then just executing the drawing. There’s a lot of discovery that’s made in-between these different steps.

I still make sketches, but I like to keep them very rough and raw. Often, I’m trying to get the expression in the sketch. Oftentimes I don’t go beyond a very loose sketch or a loose model, so that I can interpret and discover the best form or the best way to get where I’m going. Things change in this discovery period of translating what a two-dimensional drawing looks like into three-dimensional, one-to-one physical space. I’ll notice a little moment with some wrapping, and I’ll try to zoom in and focus on that nuance, which might end up guiding how the rest of the work comes together.

Using the Lawless works as an example, after I finished that process the metal frame is joined together with brass brazing, then it gets a heat patina on it. When I’m creating the base structure, I’m thinking very architecturally about how these pieces are coming together and how weight, balance, and proportion combine to make the expressive furniture. The final moment is me in the studio combining these two raw industrial materials—upholstered foam sections and metal base structure—with my body.

JY

You mentioned using brass brazing. What fabrication techniques are you exploring right now?

EF

One of the main techniques that I use is brass brazing, which I also use on steel. Traditionally, it is used in bike-building industries, where they’re fusing frame parts together. It creates a nice, filleted joint between two connected parts that you can’t find in a lot of other metal joinery techniques. If I were to weld tube steel together, you would have a convex joint that you would then have to clean up in order to make [it] look good.

After all the steel tube parts are brass brazed together, I then file all those joints together, with each piece of furniture having hundreds of joints. I spend the most amount of my time prepping these frames for the heat patina. After I file all the brass-brazed joints, I come in and sand the entire frame down before cleaning and sterilizing it. Afterwards, the frame is put into a kiln for heat patina. That heat creates the coloration on the steel, the raw steel and heat creating the color on its own without dyes or staining. I choose temperatures that will produce specific colors. I don’t have entire control over those colors though. The material dictates a lot of its colors, which I really enjoy.

JY

How did you discover or learn about doing this type of metalwork?

My own research. One of the big discoveries I made at Cranbrook was that I could put a heat patina on the steel and that the brass would stay unaffected. After the heat patina, the brass stays nice and bright. I didn’t realize that until I did a bunch of material experiments during my thesis project at Cranbrook. That was a very “aha” moment for me.

JY

Since you are from Michigan, I was curious if there is anything about the state, or the Midwest, that inspires your work?

EF

After living in Detroit for seven years, I found there is certain attitude or ethos behind the work that is made here—not only my own, but a large amount of what is created in Detroit and the surrounding area. I think it has a lot to do with the history of Detroit and what it’s gone through, but also what the city offers. There is an attitude of “get it done by any means necessary” that people have. Not relying on government, the city, or other sanctions that you normally would rely on, and just doing it for yourself.

I really appreciate that attitude, and I didn’t realize how special it was until going over to Europe. For instance, when I was in Italy, there are limitations, with a feeling from people that said, “No, you can’t do that. Just slow down. No, we don’t do that here.” But in Detroit, it’s like, “You can do that. You can do anything. Anybody can do anything.” You don’t find so many barriers put in front of you.

You find that throughout the city, too. Not just in the people. For instance, in Detroit there are these things I call “ghost gardens.” Given the history of Detroit, there are a lot of abandoned houses. If you go through neighborhoods that experienced that [abandonment], you find empty lots that used to have houses on them, which have since been torn down. Today, you can see where maybe a walkway once used to be, because there are flowers on each side of an empty path leading up to what used to be a front door. Nothing is there anymore, but still the flowers remain. The ghost gardens give me hope. They remind me that something beautiful and amazing can appear anywhere.▪︎

Experience and shop for Evan's work in Idea House 3, located within the Walker Art Center. Open during regular museum hours, by appointment, or anytime on shop.walkerart.org.

Want to learn more about Idea House and the designer's involved? Discover the rest of the series Houses of Ideas on the Walker Reader.