Video: Made In Detroit -- The Magic of a Furniture Craftsman and His Practical Art

In an era of cheap goods made in faraway lands, it’s easy to not give much thought to how any of it is made, or finds its way into our homes. We don’t need to find Vietnam on a map as long as we can find Canton, to pick out a chair at Ikea called something like the Ålthørp. Our biggest concern will be why there’s an extra screw after the thing is put together.

Alan Kaniarz takes a different view.

The jigsaw pattern of this chair's slats give it a dramatic shape. (Photo: Michael Lucido)

The 65-year-old native Detroiter makes furniture in a sawdusty space in the Russell Industrial Center on I-75 in Detroit. He also repairs and restores stained glass, lighting fixtures and other old-house details, but for now, let’s concentrate on his furniture. He uses modern materials – plywood, angle iron, galvanized steel – and the computer-aided technology that today’s manufacturing uses, even the stuff they sell in Canton. But what Kaniarz (pronounced KAHN-yash) makes is closer to art.

He produces furniture made from jigsaw-cut plywood slats. The slats are fitted together, glued and doweled, and when finished, stand as elegantly curved or dramatically angled chairs and tables, in the mid-century modern design tradition. It’s expensive, but not outrageously so. And the line has a name kind of like you’d find in Canton – Möbel Link.

“I wanted something that sounded European,” Kaniarz said.

He’s a self-taught craftsman who learned on a series of skilled-trade jobs – auto mechanics, welding, stained glass, and of course woodworking – and combined elements of them all in middle age, when he started trusting his own design sense and artistic eye. He’s never worked in an office or any job that required a necktie. He never had formal education beyond high school, in fact. But today he teaches at the College for Creative Studies. His work was featured in a design biennale in St. Etienne, France. He’s been in Architectural Digest.

“Some people are not suited to working behind a desk,” Kaniarz said. He counts himself among them.

Kaniarz grew up in a time when blue-collar jobs were plentiful in Detroit. Boys took shop class and learned rudimentary wood and metal working skills. If you wanted to go further, many fathers kept small shops in their garages, where they tinkered with engines or motors or small electronics.

“If you were having a problem, they’d help you figure it out,” Kaniarz says. And when you graduated, there were hundreds of factories and smaller shops where you could find work.

Loss of Handwork

So much of that is gone now. Much was inevitable as technology and the economy changed, but the loss of handwork -- that’s what Kaniarz regrets.

His classes at CCS are in “foundations,” the practical skills an artist needs to produce his or her own designs. You can imagine a bronze sculpture, but if you have no idea how to fabricate it, you’re not much of an artist.

Angle iron, a common and inexpensive piece of structural steel, is used for the arms of this leather-upholstered chair made by Alan Kaniarz. (Photo: Michael Lucido)

“I teach people how to use their hands, and learn the processes of how things are made,” he said. Students often start the class resentful, especially if they’re majoring in something unrelated to wood or metal work. But it’s funny how satisfying making things by hand can be, he said – even the complainers tend to finish the course with a different attitude.

Hand work, manual arts, whatever you call it -- these things call on different parts of the brain than reading or scrolling through social media on a phone, Kaniarz said. “It opens new neural pathways,” he said. “It literally makes you smarter.”

That’s half in jest, but he points out that a person who knows enough about wiring to change their own light switch needs little more than a screwdriver, a $7 switch and 15 minutes of time, whereas someone who must call an electrician could end up $200 poorer, with considerably more time invested.

Kaniarz lives in “one of the best arts-and-crafts houses in Royal Oak,” full of things he made himself – like his kitchen cabinets. He’s renovated a couple of buildings he picked up cheap from the city, turning small storefronts into loft-type living spaces, because along the way he also got a contractor’s license.

“It’s a good thing, being around young people, smart people, creative people,” he said of his CCS students. And it was artists who, in large part, encouraged this blue-collar guy to think of himself not only as a craftsman, but as an artist and designer, too.

“I owe a great deal to artists,” he said. “They have changed my life for the better. I’m living a better life than I would normally be able to afford, based on my income, because I can work with my hands.”