As design culture increasingly reckons with questions of sustainability, overproduction, and what meaningful innovation looks like, this year’s physical Clerkenwell Design Week Award arrives as something refreshingly grounded: an object shaped by process, material intelligence, and the quiet poetry of making itself.
Designed by Henry Marks, the sculptural award uses American cherry to celebrate craft as an aesthetic language as much as a way of thinking. For Marks, whose practice bridges exhibition design and fine woodworking, the project also marked a deeply personal turning point. After nearly two decades designing museum, exhibition, and commercial environments across the UK and internationally, the founder of Marks Design began reevaluating his relationship to creativity following both the pandemic and the passing of his father. “After years of predominantly desk-based work, I wanted to reconnect with the physical and hands-on side of the creative process,” he explains.
Currently completing a Fine Woodwork, Furniture Design & Making Diploma at London’s Building Crafts College, Marks has embraced a more materially driven practice where making itself generates form. Rather than approaching the CDW award as a conventional trophy, he reframed it as an exploration of woodworking. The final object evolved around three core gestures–interlock, offset, and receive–each derived from the physical logic of joinery and timber construction.
“The ‘ah-ha’ moment came when I stopped thinking about the object as a traditional trophy and instead approached it as a sculptural response to woodworking processes,” Marks says. “Once I allowed the geometry to be shaped by machining, offsets, rebates and voids created through making, the design became much more resolved and authentic to the material.”
That material-first approach strongly resonated with the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), which supported the initiative as part of its ongoing advocacy for materially literate, responsible design. For David Venables, European Director of AHEC, the partnership was about fostering conversation. “We’re not interested in branding,” he says. “We want to talk about a material.”
Crafted from wood supplied by AHEC, each award intentionally reveals tonal shifts, knots, and grain variation often eliminated in commercial production. Marks embraced those inconsistencies as defining features rather than imperfections. “I was interested in exposing both long grain and end grain within the final form,” he explains, “allowing tonal variation and texture to become defining visual features of the object.”
For Venables, that embrace of variation speaks directly to the future of responsible design. “Nature doesn’t do consistency,” he says. “Every single piece of wood is different… that’s the celebration.” In an era dominated by engineered surfaces and synthetic imitations of timber, the award instead foregrounds the sensory and emotional qualities only real wood can provide.
Even the production process reinforced those values. Working alongside maker Moe Reddish, Marks refined the design through conversations around timber movement, grain direction, and lamination techniques. “Rather than treating production as a separate stage,” he says, “the workshop processes became the driving force behind the object’s geometry, character, and meaning.”
The result is a lasting material story that will continue evolving long after the ceremony itself as the cherry deepens in tone over time, carrying with it the marks of process, touch, and use.
With professional degrees in architecture and journalism, New York-based writer Joseph has a desire to make living beautifully accessible. His work seeks to enrich the lives of others with visual communication and storytelling through design. When not writing, he teaches visual communication, theory, and design.
Ref: https://design-milk.com/the-beauty-of-wood-grain-takes-center-stage-in-henry-marks-cdw-award-design/
