As ones who lives in an eighty-year-old house with three wood-burning fireplaces, gas fireplaces have always struck my wife and me as so fake. When we see one at someone’s house, we glance at each other with that “What are they thinking?” look that husband and wife both readily understand. Indeed, we think: Why would anyone go with such a fakery when one can have a real, wood-burning fireplace? But then last year, while on the Ohio City Home Tour that we take in each year, Beth and I visited a condo overlooking Cleveland and encountered a gas-burning fireplace that struck us as very real. It was a custom fireplace with the gas flames shooting through a bed of ceramic glass pebbles. And it hit me that the absence of the artificial logs held the key to rendering an authentic gas-burning fireplace. It shouldn’t attempt to be a knock-off of a wood-burning fireplace, but use new and different flame technology to create a completely new and different experience.
Consider this:
versus this:
Then just this month, I was catching up on the past few issues of Make magazine and came across this article in Volume 11, “Router Aesthetics: Now that ‘Digital Carpentry’ has come to exist, how do you make it authentic?” by Bruce Sterling, and this passage: “A routered thing shouldn’t be a mere downmarket knockoff of some earlier method of carpentry. A router is a new thing in the world, so a clever designer should master it and use it expressively.”
It seems to me that this mindset holds the key to rendering authenticity, especially original authenticity, when using any new technology.
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First, I totally agree - I was presented with a variation of this at a home show recently for an outdoor grill set-up. The ones that tried to fake the campfire look failed to impress - seemed to fake. But the ones that created a whole new experience - with molded glass and variations on designs were exceptional.