Louey Chisholm

Louise Brigham (January 1, 1875 – March 30, 1956) was an American early-20th-century designer and teacher. She was a pioneering champion of the use of recycled materials in furniture design. A system she invented for building furniture out of packing crates represents one of the earliest to adopt a modular approach to the design of individual units. She also founded one of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture companies, as well as the Home Thrift Organization (HTA) to teach woodworking to New York City boys. In 1940, she received a medal from the HTA in honor of her quarter century of service to the organization.

Early life and education Louise Ashton Brigham was born in Boston, the fourth of five children of William Cleveland Brigham (b. 1840) and Maria Wilson Sheppard Brigham (b. 1845). She had an older brother, Waldo (b. 1869), and an older sister, Lucy (b. 1873). Another sister, Emma, was born four years before Louise but died in infancy. The final child of the family, Anna, was born a year after Louise. When Louise was only two years old, her mother died, and she was to lose her father when she was just 19.

Brigham studied art and design in New York at the Pratt Institute and the Chase School of Art (which became the New York School of Art in 1898 and is known today as Parsons The New School for Design), as well as at art schools in Europe. 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 Munro 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.

Box furniture 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), 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.

Home Thrift Association 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."

Ready-to-assemble furniture 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.

Henry Chisholm died in 1920, and in the ensuing years Brigham worked on a new edition of her book (never published) and a memoir (since lost).

Awards and honors 1940, medal from the HTA in honor of her quarter century of service to the organization she founded

Publications Box Furniture: How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home. Illustrations by Edward H. Ascherman from designs by the author. New York: Century, 1909. "How Boys Made Toys from Boxes". St. Nicholas, vol. 42 (January 1915), p. 440. "How Boys Make Furniture from Boxes". St. Nicholas, vol. 42 (January 1915). Part I: p. 241. Part II: p. 339. "How I Furnished My Entire Flat from Boxes". Ladies' Home Journal, vol. 27. Part I: Sept. 1, 1910, pp. 70, 74. Part II (My Bedroom): Oct. 1, 1910, pp. 86, 92. Part III (My Dining Room): Nov. 1, 1910, pp. 80, 86. Part IV (My Kitchen): Dec. 1, 1910, pp. 68, 74. "Rugs and Baskets Which Cost Nothing". Ladies' Home Journal, August 1910.