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Unusual Shop Furniture: A "Carpenter's Piano Desk"
A workbench with style and musical leanings
This has to be the most unusual workbench I've ever seen:
Enter a caption (optional)It was created by a Taiwanese artist and furniture builder whom, frustratingly, I can find little information about; his name is alternately transliterated as "Chen Yuchien" and "Chen Youjian."
Enter a caption (optional)According to a translated description of an exhibition in Taiwan, Chen reportedly created the piece to do double-duty within his "limited living space. I cannot simultaneously fit both a workbench and a piano desk. How can I make one table work for both tasks?" To solve it he's built in height-adjustability, achieved by turning the crank beneath the worksurface. It seems the top tracks vertically on those large steel pins, but there's no information offered as to how they lock in place.
Enter a caption (optional)By the way, while it's referred to as a "Carpenter's Piano Desk," that's apparently a translation error—in this shot below you can see the lyre-like instrument he's probably referring to:
Enter a caption (optional)A nice touch is how the wooden cover he's made for the storage depression up top seems it will slide nicely into the slot beneath it, next to the crank for the tail vise.
Enter a caption (optional)You can see more of Chen's work on his Flickr page.
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Hi, the musical instrument is a guqin, a seven-string zither: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guqin
A more accurate translation of the title would be "The carpenter's zither desk". You can hear what the zither sounds like at: https://youtu.be/2es7oZzwLWM?t=5s
Traditionally, the guqin is considered a musical instrument of the intellectual elite class in ancient China. Only nobles and scholars play this instrument. As it is a very quiet instrument, this zither is only played between close friends in intimate settings for private enjoyment or for meditation. It is never played in the open for public performances.
Even today, playing the guqin would be considered an unusually high-brow hobby. If you know how to play the guqin well, you would be quite a rarity. The UNESCO website states that there are less than a thousand trained guqin players in the world.
From a product design perspective, it is quite intriguing to see this zither, a historically aristocratic music instrument (with intellectual and meditative connotations) paired with a common carpenter's work bench.
It certainly makes for an interesting statement.
Yanying, thanks for the information! Having the cultural background info completely changes my perception of the object; I didn't recognize that Chen's piece offers much deeper commentary than meets the eye.