OddShop = Kellen Deighton

Curved room divider/shelf in walnut and painted MDO/poplar. This piece has nearly 100 hours of labour poured into it. It is as much a sculptural experiment as it is millwork. In this work, I am trying to uncover a kind of vernacular: one that expresses decorative abundance and a celebration of form and material without tipping into arbitrariness or tedium for its own sake. I recently tried to explain this work and my methodology to a friend as an attempt to relearn a hypothetically forgotten architectural style, once mastered by generations, but only from a text, with no depictions of the work or its methods. I Imagine trying to recover a way of making without any direct genealogical connection to its practitioners, only a few references, filtered through another medium. Even with technical mastery, it would be like trying to speak a lost language with marbles in the mouth. Lately, the work has been a process of learning how to work differently: to plan, but not too much; to be precise where precision matters and loose where I can, to respond, at every step, to weight, depth, proportion, and shadow; and not to be afraid to do more when it comes from care, humour, and curiosity.

Ten years ago I convinced this girl that we should get married, that it was a good idea. We were both pretty suspicious of the institution of marriage, but some internal force compelled me into a kind of seriousness about it. I think about this a lot, why I felt so convinced to lean into this tradition. And I think the reason has to do with how magic works: there is real power in the act. The performance turns our thoughts into matter. It’s like a spell you cast on your future. Marrying this person was one of the most intuitive leaps I’ve taken in a life that has continued to reveal itself as a kind of sacred path—filled with decisions that either reinforce or diverge from a deep sense of what some greater intelligence leads me toward. Ten years of marriage is probably long enough to warrant the authority to offer advice to anyone considering whether to get married. I would say: trust your intuition. But that is only the spark of direction. The rest takes real effort, intention, self‑reflection, and brutal honesty. You will have to give each other enough space to grow, to change. And if you are open to the ride, you’ll learn that one of the greatest things about being human is the kind of alchemy that happens when we tap into collective potential, deep companionship, and radical self‑awareness. That, to me, is the power of a sustained and nourished marriage.

Six years ago today I was reveling in modern medicine after my epidural + spending the whole night chatting up nurses when I should’ve been asleep. The first thing I said to Lulu when she came out was “I like her” because it felt somehow disingenuous to say that I loved her without really knowing her. Six years later, I can say unequivocally that I love her. I love how smart and funny and sensitive and passionate she is. She loves her friends and family with a ferocity I have never seen. She is strong willed, brave, and will fight you to the death to prove you wrong. Happy sixth birthday, my sweet angel baby Lulu.

A lense made of glass Glass recurs throughout poetry, song, and art; a material that simultaneously embodies fragility and translucency. Its prismatic quality, bending and breaking light into color, has captivated artists since its invention. It is both material and immaterial, architectural and painterly. Glass teaches us about risk. It exemplifies what David Pye called the workmanship of risk: the idea that in craft or what he calls “workmanship”, “the work is continually at risk during the process of making.” This is essential to craft; not the guaranteed replication of a known outcome, but the lived negotiation between maker, material, and moment. It’s what I’m trying to express when I tell students, after a failure in the shop, “Now you know this is a craft, it only is one if everything can go wrong at any moment.” The line doesn’t always land as humor, but it points to something essential: our relationship with failure is the point. Craft education is philosophical in the original sense, a love of wisdom. The lessons are embedded in the work itself, revealed through our bodies in motion. By attending with our hands, eyes, and senses, we acquire a form of knowledge that resists abstraction and lives in muscle, material, and intuition. During a six-hour “make and take” intensive led by artists Jocelyne Le Léannec and Suzy Melo, fourteen students explored the fundamentals of stained-glass fabrication. They began by learning how design must respond to glass’s physical limits — its desires, in a way. The glass wants what the glass wants. From design and cutting to grinding, foiling, soldering, and finishing, each step invited negotiation between intention and resistance. Not everyone completed their ambitious projects within the time, but everyone left with a smile and a renewed sense of possibility. This is the quiet magic of craft: it brings forth new relations, builds confidence and community, and allows each of us to rediscover ourselves through the act of making. RE-SKILL THE WORLD! Special thanks to Mr Goen for helping to imagine this event, these tools and for his interest in bringing stained glass back to architecture school!

Hat rack in birch

Mafrash : Tethered by relation I’ve been building a table for a friend; a gift for their partner, who is Iranian. This project is inspired by a mafrash they recently purchased: a traditional, woven storage and bedding bag, historicaly used by tribal communities in Iran and the surrounding regions. When filled with textiles, a mafrash becomes a soft, box-like piece of furniture, a container, a seat, a backrest, a surface. It’s an object that travels with the household, yet still holds the idea of home. While conceptualizing the table that would support this mafrash, I imagined how it holds memory not through heaviness, but through touch; tight weaving, stitched edges, the way its form yields slightly under pressure. This table I’m building is, in many ways, a response to that object and to the stories woven into it. It has become a conversation about mobility, belonging, and continuity. I hesitated to call such objects “nomadic,” wary of that term’s romantic baggage, the outsider’s gaze that conjures timeless “noble savages,” flattening vibrant social systems into exotic simplicity. My friend, drawing from a knowledge keeper, offered the term “sustainably mobile object” instead. This phrase resonates: it honors the mafrash’s endurance across regions and generations, while aspiring to what good furniture achieves, made to fold, move, and adapt without losing its tether to place and people. Good furniture resists entropy. Every joint, every material choice, argues that care outlasts time. When gathered around it, with the mafrash propped atop we’re upheld not just by wood and weave, but by the intentions woven in: offerings across distances, inviting repair and renewal. In this way, the table becomes a sacred tether, folding time and space into continuous relation. It connects us to known places and lost ones, to people we’ve held and may never meet. Memory settles into its surfaces, intention into its seams. More than a gift, this piece carries a specific relationship forward. Like the mafrash, it proves mobility need not mean loss, it means continuity, borne lightly. A sustainably mobile object that never forgets where, and who, it came from.

Cherry hand nuts - 1 of 10 If contemporary anxiety is bound up with speed, abstraction, and dispossession from the means of shaping our environments, then a theory of craft that foregrounds slowness, situated making, and shared know-how sketches a plausible counter-practice. In such a theory, craft is not nostalgic hobbyism but a small-scale politics: it rehearses non-alienated labour, keeps alive forms of communal and intergenerational knowledge, and trains people to locate meaning in tangible, revisable acts rather than in distant systems they cannot touch. Work is the wedge: craft has a deliberately anachronistic tempo, a pedagogy of attention, and a mode of labour where autonomy is not an abstraction but something literally held, adjusted, and carried.

Entryway closet (interior) ✅

2025’s @kellendeighton ‘s ornament! Last year we spent the Holidays in Minneapolis with my fam and because we didn’t get a tree, Kellen cut off the top of my cousins tree (WITH CONSENT) to use to make this year’s ornament. Every year his ornaments reflect a feeling or vibe of the year, and this year, because of a series of events, (Travel, surgery, and I asked him too) he didn’t work as much as he normally does. He tried to Chanel a form that would capture a year where we spent getting closer even after a decade of being married. His words: “The helix is a good form for that, it’s a geometry that is designed to intertwine, and theoretically can go infinitely.” It’s not lost on me how annoying it is to talk to about how much you love and appreciate your spouse on a public forum, but I feel like I’m in such a uniquely special position to be in such a complimentary partnership with someone who wants to grow together. (No matter that he told me I was acting like my mother yesterday and I did smack his hand with my phone 😎) I love this and so many other traditions we’ve created together. Happy Channukah to all who enjoy potatoes! 🥔🍠

I have Been thinking about the traditons, and tropes of folk art as I have been slowly working to finish parts of our house. These thoughts have lead me to a (re)investigate a painting practice, one that consideres and questions notions of a folk art vernacular. There is a long tradition of folk art and its coloqial asthetic taking the form of hand painted furniture, millwork and interiors. You can imagine the tropes; blocky, naive expressions of colour and nature using common commercialy available pigments used to customize and adorne. These objects are inherently optimistic, they are often borne as an impulse to celebrate and affirm ones will in an alienating world. I look to folk art to remind me why I love art, and making things. These often nameless artists remind me to scratch the itch, trust my instincts and create more than I contemplate. Purple on purple bathroom vanity: custom concrete countertop with hand painted Baltic birch doors, drawers.

As I reflect on the train ride from Dorset in the southwest of the UK, I feel a rare sense that a bold, rich future remains possible. I’ve just spent two days at Hooke Park, an experimental woodland campus where young architects and designers learn to understand the world by building it themselves. There are no silos, no “circle backs,” no invisible labour. It’s a place of direct action, where everyone,from director to cook—knows the work that must be done to build the world we want. The directors wear worn steel toes. The mess hall workers all have names, and everyone eats together. Designers are embedded in every step,from forest to craft to construction. It isn’t utopia; gravity rules everything. Projects fail often,sometimes purposefully. But that’s why people travel here: the place is contagious. It changes how you see the world and the role of making within it. On my way home, I’m thinking about what I can do tomorrow. Building together shapes more than material, it creates community. Traditions like topping out, Sundance, and Sukkot remind us that making is also ritual, a collective act of becoming. I care less about the finished object;the chair, the building,than about the human bonds forged through the struggle to make something new. That tension between pain and success is where connection and meaning emerge. I want to help create spaces for that kind of work and share the belief that building carries political, poetic, and philosophical weight—as vital as its practical purpose. If you’ve read this far, you already know this is what moves me. I hope we’ll build something together someday. Much love,

HOME FOR A WHEELBARROW - a design build competition for @faumanitoba and Sylvan stuido “an outdoor learning lab focused on experimental design practices, particularly with woody species.” The brief was simple, this outdoor studio needed a home for a wheelbarrow! Being a faculty of architecture, we couldn’t simply build a “weekend” shed package. This shed had to be designed with context, utility, budget and asthetics in mind; a humbling experience for any designer. This was another fun project to support. Many many oprtunities for hands on learning; what better way to learn how to design buildings than to build one yourself… Design by @damisi_02 & @curseofjoy - built by students at the faculty of Architecture university of Manitoba. Special shout out to @eva_hm_ and @lizonfire , for all their hard work on this build.