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This piece was inspired by the compagnonnage tradition.

Compagnonnage was a meritocratic system of craftsmanship which started in the middle ages and reached its zenith after the French revolution. Their traditional education included craft and design skills such as model-making for carpentry, joinery, cabinetry, and metalwork. Each member made a ‘tour de France,’ working and studying under masters in major centers like Lyon. After a successful tour, each guild member (compagnon) would produce a staircase model to show mastery of a variety of complicated techniques and be accepted as a master in his own right.

In my attempt to reinterpret this tradition, I chose to decontextualize such a historically rich and functionally heavy object and look at it from the perspective of an aspiring companion.

The main challenges that I set myself, construction-wise, were cantilevering the steps and maintaining the overall physical balance of the piece. Form and function inevitably informed each other, for the piece's ability to support human weight dictated a lot of the design decisions that were made along the way. 

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