Christopher Martin, nationally renowned furniture design-maker, will be giving a Hyde and Kunzendorf co-sponsored lecture titled “Design Tangents; A Story of Exploration and Common Threads,” at 4 p.m. Oct. 28 in the Union Swanson Auditorium.
Martin is founder of Christopher Martin Furniture and works as a furniture designer and maker on commission work and produces a line of small batch furniture pieces for sale online. He also collaborates with traditional artisans in Ghana and India.
Before opening his own business, Martin taught furniture design in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University starting in 1999, and retiring in 2022 as an emeritus professor.
In 2008, Martin took leave from his teaching position to serve as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in the West African country of Ghana for two years. He was deeply influenced by his experiences there and his research and creative outputs show this.
More recently, Martin was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to spend five months in India working with both traditional artisans and modern craftsmen and technicians to develop a series of contemporary furniture pieces that pay reverence to the richness of India’s traditional craft culture.
For this lecture, Martin will give an illustrated tour that will delve into his body of furniture pieces. He will discuss the many sources of inspiration, his fascination with material and process and the progression of his own work.
This presentation is part of the College of Architecture’s 2022-2023 Hyde Lecture Series featuring speakers from across disciplines that are united under the common theme of “Information Stimulus — New Paradigms in Planning and Design.” Now, more so than ever, the evolution in information technology is being driven by novel means of uncovering, transferring, and disseminating information. Advanced paradigms have emerged through the information drawn from other disciplines and the generation of innovative methods and tools and how they impact the professions of planning and design now and in the future.
The college’s Hyde Lecture Series is a long-standing, endowed, public program. Each year the college hosts compelling speakers in the fields of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning that enrich the ongoing dialog around agendas which are paramount to the design disciplines and our graduates.
