(tools clatter) (machine whirring) (saw buzzing) - My wife, Shana McCaw and I, have an art practice.

(saw buzzing) Current Projects is sort of an outgrowth of our art practice.

The name is sort of intentionally open-ended.

It kind of allows us the freedom to pick and choose different projects that are interesting to us and work in different fields and different industries.

Every project is rooted in art in some way.

That kind of permeates everything we do here.

If it has art, design, research and craft in it, then that feels like a really good fit for a project for us.

(compelling piano music) MOA came to me and asked me to make this furniture.

They asked us, along with several other furniture makers, to reproduce some Frank Lloyd Wright pieces based on original drawings.

(compelling music continues) In many cases, these are pieces that have not been seen for a very, very long time, or in some cases that were never made.

They really hadn't been a lot of deep scholarship into Frank Lloyd Wright's furniture.

There's been dozens and dozens of books written on his architecture.

Many of these really felt like quite radical designs and they look a lot different than a lot of the furniture of the period.

I mean, it just felt so modern.

It's quite timeless.

(compelling piano music concludes) (steady dramatic music) (steady music continues) (steady music continues) (steady music fades) (saw buzzing) It is kind of a mistake I think, to give me credit for the work because it really was a team effort.

(saw buzzing) The way we work at our studio is very collaborative.

I worked with Tim Stoelting on the drawings.

He helped translate the drawings into digital 3D models.

Joe Thrasher did a lot of the work on the actual build of the furniture pieces.

When we were presented with this project, we were like, okay, well this is a great project to get into, but it's not really that challenging.

You know, it's a privilege to be, you know, working on these designs, but really it's cutting a bunch of shapes out of plywood and some pretty simple join, or you put it together, call it a day, not too bad.

(paper rustling) So we started with one drawing from Frank Lloyd Wright for a chair and a table from the tree room at Taliesin.

(dramatic piano music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) Frank's drawings didn't always add up.

On the tree room table, there's a measurement and then it's crossed out.

Another measurement is put in its place.

If you model that, the rest of the proportions no longer make sense.

So we had to make the decision to say, okay, well we think that what he wants to do is he wants to change all of the dimensions of this table based on that new measurement.

(dramatic piano music continues) Then we started asking the question of, well, what kind of plywood would he use?

And after a lot of discussions about this, it became clear that it probably would've been Tidewater cypress plywood, which is something you can't really get anymore.

The only way you can get this material now is to pull ancient trees out of the swamp.

I happened to be in Florida when we were kind of in discussions about this and I happened to be right near one of the mills, one of the very few places in the country where they actually processed this stuff.

So I went to the mill and talked to the guys who were actually pulling these things out of the swamp and milling 'em up and they had this whole vast yard filled with nothing but Tidewater, cypress.

And so I ended up buying a few boards.

The stuff that Frank Lloyd Wright was using was what we call lumber core.

The way they made it is they put together strips of solid wood and then there was a much thicker veneer on top and bottom.

(dramatic music continues) When you are asked to actually make something that is based on a historic precedent, you encounter questions that you wouldn't if you were just reading about it or writing about it.

You know, there's little things that you run into that you just, you have to, you have to come up with an answer for.

I've heard it referred to as experimental archeology.

Sort of the process of researching the past by doing.

It's a really interesting way of engaging with history.

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