Louise Brigham

During her early 30s, Brigham traveled widely in Europe, staying abroad for much of the period between 1905 and 1910. As she herself put it in a 1913 interview: "I spent the biggest part of five years in Europe, studying various kinds of handiwork with the peasants and the artists of nineteen different countries."[1] Her destinations included the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

Highly influential for Brigham's later design work were two summers spent in a coal-mining camp on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, which sits well above the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago.[3] Brigham does not precisely date these two summers in her published writings, but a reference to a visit by members of an expedition led by the American aviator Walter Wellman suggests that one of them was 1906, the year that Wellman set up headquarters in the Svalbard archipelago in an attempt to reach the North Pole by airship. Brigham stayed in a camp managed by John Munroe Longyear, a fellow Bostonian of her father’s generation. In 1905, Longyear had co-founded the Arctic Coal Company to carry out mining operations in an area along the west coast of Spitsbergen that came to be called Longyear City (today Longyearbyen). The camp housed 80 men at the time Brigham was there—rising to several hundred in the years leading up to World War I—and conditions were extremely primitive. Enough food and equipment had to be brought in by ship during the summer months to supply the camp during the eight months it would be cut off from the outside world by winter ice, and the result of this stockpiling was large stacks of empty boxes. Under these difficult conditions, Brigham undertook to design what she called "box furniture" for the camp out of those cast-off packing crates, following up on some earlier experiments along the same lines.

In 1909, Brigham published a book of her designs for building furniture entirely out of packing crates entitled Box Furniture. Illustrated with line drawings by the interior designer Edward H. Aschermann (whom Brigham had met through their mutual friend, the Viennese Secessionist architect-designer Josef Hoffmann), [4] Box Furniture was a how-to manual for a target audience of modestly skilled working-class householders. It offered dozens of different furniture plans, advice on how to select and break down crates, instruction in basic carpentry, and a list of necessary tools. Designs were grouped into suites for specific rooms, as well as organized along a trajectory of increasing complexity.[2] Brigham also offered complementary advice on curtain materials and overall color schemes.

The cover of Brigham's 1909 book on creating furniture from packing crates.

In addition to working exclusively with recycled materials of the cheapest kind, Brigham planned many of her designs to be multifunctional and space-saving (a drop-leaf table, a set of nesting stools, a desk with built-in bookcases) as they were aimed primarily at urban apartment dwellers.[2] Brigham also took a modular or sectional approach to some of her pieces, as several of the smaller pieces are designed in such a way that they can either stand alone or work as subunits of larger pieces.[2]

A room of furniture built according to Brigham's designs, illustrated for The Ladies' Home Journal, 1910.

Brigham specifically aligns her modernist aesthetic with that of Hoffmann, with its focus on the square as a fundamental unit of design. However, the raw surfaces and rough construction that were keystones of her approach don't become a mainstay of modern design for another two decades, when Gerrit Rietveld's crate furniture of the 1930s recapitulates Brigham's box furniture under the banner of De Stijl.

A combination desk, reading table, and bookcase built from crates during Brigham's sojourn on the island of Spitsbergen. The plans were later published in her book.

Brigham's ambitious project of combining up-to-date design with a do-it-yourself approach was both unusual in its own time and a forerunner of today's green design movement.[2] One writer assesses Brigham's project as "a comprehensive system attached to a design theory and a social agenda".[5]

In 1910, Brigham showed "Room Delightful", an entire suite of box furniture for a child’s room at a Child Welfare Exhibit in New York City. Interested city officials offered Brigham the use of the then-closed Gracie Mansion for further experimentation. Brigham accepted and founded the Home Thrift Association, a woodworking "laboratory" for boys: "We give each boy a set of the seven simple tools and show him the beginnings of his work. Then he does the rest."[2] The HTA, which later opened to girls as well, aimed "not only at thrift, but at the conservation of the home."[1]

Initially headquartered in just two rooms of Gracie Mansion, the club quickly outgrew its space as it gained some 600 apprentices in its first year of operation. It then moved to 516 E. 89th Street, not far from Brigham’s own apartment at 539 E. 89th St., which Brigham furnished almost entirely out of box furniture made by the HTA apprentices as a kind of model showroom for the project.[2] The total cost of the box furnishings for Brigham's apartment was around $4, or less than half of an average worker's weekly wage.[6]

During World War 1, Brigham founded a box furniture factory on the Lower East Side of New York. It aimed to capture the low-cost end of the emerging market in factory-made furniture while providing jobs for modestly skilled workers. It was eventually turned over the YMCA to run on behalf of returning war veterans.[2]

Around the same time, Brigham and two partners set up Home Art Masters, a mail-order business offering ready-to-assemble furniture kits with instructions so that the item could be assembled at home with simple tools. This short-lived business was decades ahead of what are usually taken to the starting points of commercial RTA furniture, which include efforts by Australian designer Frederick Charles Ward (late 1940s), American cabinetmaker Erie J. Sauder (1953), and IKEA (1956).[2]