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As I was shopping for some new computer workstation furniture this week, I began to want to know more about cabinet making.
Before the days of mass production, cabinet making was a specialty of certain carpenters and designers. The smaller pool of artists helped cabinet makers like Thomas Chippendale and Thomas Sheraton stand out. Their work was popularized with the inclusion in the publication of books full of furniture designs published by the likes of George Hepplewhite.
Steam power would change things, pushing the tools past former limitations. Through mass production, the techniques used to create furniture would often be simplified to produce more of a product more quickly. With the factory-style operations able to guarantee more volume, for both foreign and domestic sales, the traditional cabinet makers were often squeezed out of the market. This transition was accelerated by the growing demand of a new, expanding middle class for all types of furniture. Believe it or not, before this time furniture was not all that common in America, except among the wealthy and privileged. The middle class now had the wealth to afford more things such as furniture and furnishings.
The mass-produced designs were not for everyone, of course, and some felt cheaper production did not mean a better product. The arts and craft movement soon spread from the United Kingdom to the United States and other former or current British colonies. The major complaint of the movement was that something in cabinet making had been lost in the transition from human hands to machines.
Following World War II, woodworking was taken up by Americans as a popular hobby, adding a personal touch to the furniture in their homes. So impressive were some of these amateurs that selling their work could bring double the prices for which the mass-produced models were being sold. So successful was the amateur movement that it has been said that the number of pieces produced exceeded all of the furniture produced prior to the 18th century.
The Information Age would bring a new market for cabinet making, in the form of computer furniture. Personal computer users wanted furniture that could help them to show off their new devices and keep them organized at the same time.
As corporations and organizations began to implement computers into their operations, they required modified furniture, data center furniture and operations center furniture.
Cabinet makers found that a hutch style cabinet worked best to suit the many needs of a computer. Typically, a hutch is a set of shelves or cabinets which, as an upper unit, are attached to a lower unit which has a counter. The desktop makes the hutch especially useful as computer furniture because it can accommodate a keyboard and a mouse. Before the age of computers, hutches tended to be found in offices or dining rooms and was the center for addressing paperwork and other clerical duties. To save more space, hutch tables in the early 19th century operated on a pivot to allow the upper part of the hutch to lie flat, transforming the piece into a larger tabletop. Such innovations were fondly embraced considering that most Americans still were living in cramped living conditions.
The history of the cabinet has endured for centuries but with our devices going wireless and mobile, one has to wonder if it will endure further.
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