Christopher Norman is a Los Angeles architect who’s been creating wood furniture and abstract sculpture for 20 years. His form-making is strictly subtractive, with each piece the result of an initial idea shifted during the handicraft process. Norman uses freshly cut trees rather than industrially conditioned lumber, working with logs that are between 100-200 pounds and several feet in any dimension. To take on such large projects, he uses a WWII-era pattern-making mill that’s similar to a computer-controlled robot, but manually run — giving him the ability to make decisions moment by moment so he can get the best character out of the wood while he sculpts. After a piece leaves the studio, it continues to shift as it conditions naturally; in the tradition of green-woodworking, the final shape comes after the material achieves equilibrium with its environment.

@christophernormanprojects
Renderings by Charlotte Taylor and Victor Roussel