Nobles fired up over kiln

The wood-fired kiln Masakazu Kusakabe has designed for the Noble and Greenough School produces few carbon emissions, saves time, and will allow Nobles to simultaneously do standard and hand-molded ceramics firings - while baking bread.

It is "kind of like a dream kiln," said Kusakabe, who noted that a firing which might take one week elsewhere will take just two days here. "This kiln is no smoke, no pollution," he said.

The Japanese kiln pioneer has designed and built many smokeless and efficient wood-fired kilns around the world. His latest - a joint effort with Noble and Greenough and Harvard University's Ceramics Program - honors the late Makoto Yabe, a longtime ceramics teacher at both schools.

The Makoto Yabe Memorial Kiln is being built next to the small memorial garden in his name on the campus of the Dedham private school. Yabe died of stomach cancer in 2005.

"He was just such a gentle soul, and a master potter. And a master teacher, too," said John Dorsey, the ceramics instructor at Nobles.

Dorsey said Nancy Selvage, the director of Harvard's Ceramics Program, has been investigating green and environmentally sustainable ways of running a program, from glazing to firing to recycling materials. While in Japan last year Selvage was directed to Kusakabe, whose kilns use far less wood than the norm, while producing traditional ash-glazed surfaces in short firing cycles.

"He has designed these kilns that fire much more quickly and have a lot stronger draft and have a lot more space for the air to mix with the wood," Selvage said.

The Harvard/Nobles kiln will be the first wood-fired kiln in the world to recycle some of the heat and energy from its flue gases back through the "fire box," or burning chamber, she added.

"He's built over a hundred wood-fired kilns and designed many more, and he's always experimenting and testing new possibilities with it, and this will be another one," Selvage said.

Kusakabe, co-author of the book "Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics," said it has been calculated that 12 percent of the gases could be recycled in this kiln, but in practice he thinks 8 percent is more likely.

Selvage said when she invited Kusakabe last year to come to Harvard this June, she assumed her program, on Western Avenue in Allston, would be relocating by January. But that move was delayed by the overall slowdown of Harvard's massive Allston development project, leaving the ceramics program with no space to build the new kiln. That is how Nobles ended up hosting it.

Dorsey said the bricks being used belonged to Yabe, who died before he was able to build his own kiln with them. After his death, Nobles created the memorial garden, and Harvard did a temporary installation of a memorial, decorative kiln arch and lantern with some of the bricks. Now, Kusakabe is reusing those same bricks to build the Nobles kiln.

The project is a way to honor a beloved colleague, and is a great partnership between Nobles and Harvard, Dorsey said.

Kusakabe delivered a lecture about his design at Harvard on Thursday of last week. Construction of the kiln under his direction began at Nobles the next day and by the following Monday afternoon what the artist called "the difficult part" was already wrapping up. He said it would measure 1.75 meters tall, and 6 meters with its chimney.

Kusakabe said in a typical kiln 70 percent of the heat generated escapes from its top, but the Nobles kiln is much more effective. It also produces "zero bad emissions," according to Dorsey.

Showing a design mockup on his laptop, Kusakabe talked metaphorically about "the boys" (oxygen) and "the girls" (carbon) meeting inside the kiln - what Dorsey called a kind of dance.

Kusakabe said he has given this type of smokeless kiln the name Sasukenei, which means "no problem" in Japanese.

Kusakabe is from Fukushima Prefecture, the same area of northern Japan that Yabe was from. Kusakabe pointed out another similarity with Yabe, noting that he too has had cancer. He was hospitalized for 10 months with a form of the disease in 2005 and 2006.

Kusakabe is set to return in November for a celebration of the kiln, which will be fired then for the first time.

The kiln's primary firing chamber, the fire box, could reach 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Dorsey said the two other chambers will use the energy of the wood-firing chamber, though they are not directly related. Because the top of the fire box will get very hot, the chamber above will function as a bread oven, for example.

"He's within these very small design created a very efficient machine that multitasks, and it's only made out of bricks," Dorsey said.

Daily News staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.