Crown of Thorns is a wooden joinery technique originating in Northern Europe. It is a fastener- and glue-free modular construction method in which hand-carved notched sticks are woven together to form intricate lattices. Historically, the technique was used for decorative objects such as crosses, boxes, and mirror frames. What fascinated me most was that the practice had almost disappeared. I found nothing in literature or online explaining how the joinery worked.

Eventually, I found one man who still practiced the technique, a craftsperson in Colorado named Bob Olsen. Bob learned the craft from his grandfather in the 1970s, and their lineage traced back to a Danish sailor in the 1800s. I traveled to Colorado to learn directly from him, and after several days of carving and assembling pieces by hand, I finally understood the geometry and the logic that allow these forms to hold together through tension alone.

When I returned to New York, I began to consider how this knowledge might be extended into a contemporary design language. For generations, the technique was used to produce expressive objects but nothing structural. I wanted to understand how far its potential could be pushed. My first exploration resulted in a stool made from 465 hand-bent aluminum elements, the first Crown of Thorns construction in history capable of bearing the weight of a person. The second took the form of a glass coffee table, in which the aluminum lattice becomes a structural exoskeleton for wood.

Crown of Thorns endures because it is more than a technique. It is a shared language that has traveled through generations of makers, each refining the idea through their hands. It shows how folk design can inform contemporary practice and how collective knowledge can shape new forms of process for designers.