Hawa al-Najjar,
the New York based, London-raised,
multidisciplinary designer
“I bought a chunk of wood and cut it up using a chainsaw and an angle grinder. The project became a side table and I posted the final design online – people really liked it”
Hawa Al-Najjar comes from a long line of carpenters, dating as far back as her great-great-grandfather, who also worked as a weaver. Her last name, al-Najjar, literally translates to “carpenter” in Arabic. Yet, even with these strong family ties to carpentry, al-Najjar didn’t set out to pursue a career in the discipline. Formally trained and educated as an architect in London, al-Najjar spent long days in college and at her first job engrossed in computer modeling programs like CAD, far away from the materials used to create the structures on her screen. Burnt out by the meticulous nature of architecture, al-Najjar quit her job in search of a more fluid discipline. One day, on a whim, al-Najjar visited a saw mill located near her family home outside of London. Something, be it creative impulse or fate, moved her closer to the work of her ancestors.
Although her father is creative – he often made ceramic sculptures for al-Najjar’s mother throughout her childhood – al-Najjar notes that her parents always encouraged her to pursue a traditional, stable career, presumably something like architecture. And yet, that afternoon spent woodworking would ultimately shift al-Najjar’s aspirations away from a traditional profession and towards an unconventional one. She would become a multidisciplinary designer. “I love[d] architecture, but it wasn’t fulfilling for me to be sitting in front of a computer rendering wood grains… I realized that I loved working with my hands,” al-Najjar recalls, smiling. That day, and in the months that followed, al-Najjar realized that design would allow her the creative expression that architecture had not.
Shortly after she quit her job in architecture, Al-Najjar traveled to New York City to visit a friend. While there, she sent a message asking to meet with noteworthy designer, Minjae Kim, whose designs she had admired online. Kim accepted, and after meeting with Al-Najjar, offered to show her the ropes. By observing Kim’s artistic process, Al-Najjar’s passion for design grew. She recalls learning about interiors and furniture design while experimenting with the different materials that bring these designs to life.“While spending time with Minjae, I got really into wood, doing sculptural and hand carved things. Then I got into grad school at Parsons and started working with metal. It’s really forgiving as a material. You can just weld it like paper and hot glue,” Al-Najjar muses.
Now in her second year of graduate school, al-Najjar has designed several original pieces of furniture. In a recent project, she discovered an antique balance scale in a thrift store and became obsessed with it. In Egyptian mythology, tells al-Najjar, the Goddess Ma’at was the arbiter of morality, and would use a balance scale to weigh the deads’ hearts against the feather of truth. If the heart was lighter or balanced with the feather, the deceased would be granted access to paradise. If the heart was heavier than the feather, the deceased would be doomed to the underworld. Inspired by this story, al-Najjar created her own version of the mythological relic, combining the antique scale, a light, which al-Najjar intended to gleam like a sack of gold, and a feather carved by hand from alabaster stone. In addition to Egyptian and Babylonian art, al-Najjar feels deeply influenced by other aesthetic concepts, such as those found in Gothic architecture. Featuring the pointed, sharp arches typically associated with gothic aesthetics, another recent project of al-Najjar’s was an ebonized chair cut from birch ply, a lightweight, albeit sturdy fine-grained wood typically used to create shelving and cabinetry.
After graduating from Parsons, al-Najjar hopes to sustain herself in New York by creating and designing furniture for clients, though she admits commissioned art can be daunting and stressful. For now, she is content to create based on her own artistic impulses, reimagining the work of her ancestors while maintaining a closeness to the trade woven throughout her family history. In the future, al-Najjar divulges that she may leave the city altogether and relocate to the woods, where, coincidentally, she found her calling. The place where she one day hopes to build, by hand of course, a peaceful dwelling for herself and other artists.
