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Wendell Castle, Inimitable Furniture Designer, Builder, Educator and Craftsman, Passes Away

On Saturday Wendell Castle, furniture designer/builder, educator and former instructor at R.I.T.’s School of American Craftsmen, passed away at the age of 85.

Castle was a true pioneer who bridged the gap between furniture design and art. A native of Kansas, Castle attended the University of Kansas and earned a B.F.A. in Industrial Design in 1958 and an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1961, then began producing fantastical pieces of furniture that refused to hew to any previous movement or style. His radical forms seemed to defy physics, gravity and material properties.

“My furniture goes against the grain of 20th century design,” Castle once said. “I have no special interest in form following function. I want to be inventive and playful, to produce furniture to make life an adventure.”

Although Castle’s designs were the very antithesis of mass production, his industrial design training showed in how he brought these forms into existence. A prolific sketcher, Castle reportedly drew for several hours each day, using overlays to refine his designs and work out impossibly-complex surfaces in an era before CAD. He’d next transition to 3D, producing countless form studies, scale models and maquettes in a process every student of ID would recognize.

When digital technologies became available, Castle embraced them. His studio in Scottsville, New York, outside of Rochester, contained a tool he nicknamed “Mr. Chips:” A six-axis CNC milling robot.

With a body of work like Castle’s, it’s tough to identify any one defining masterpiece. But his Reaper rocking chair, which Castle designed and built in 2010 when he was in his late ‘70s, might be it:

The Wright Auction House, which sold the chair for $112,500, describes how his process spanned one of the earliest techniques he’d ever learned all the way up to his usage of Mr. Chips:

Dating back to the 19th century, the technique of stack lamination involves gluing together a number of wood stacks to build up a moulded form and eventually work towards the realisation of an agile, amorphous construction. Castle’s initial encounter with this technique was as a teenager, when he apparently came across a magazine article instructing on the use of stack-laminate to create a “decoy duck”.

Working in the early stages of his career in alignment with the traditional methods necessitated by stack-lamination, he would project a drawn image of his form onto the wall, before envisaging the necessary differentiations in wood bands and translating them into hand-drawn templates. From these, wood sheets would be cut, glued and stacked together to a form which could be manipulated by hand. This process has now been adapted by Castle to empower the efficiency and accuracy of production through incorporating 3D scanning and modelling.

The technologically-based stack-laminate process comprises the 3D scanning of an original small foam model. From this model, cross-sections are determined and printed out to scale as templates. After being constructed by hand, a milling robot [Mr. Chips] contributes to the final finishing process.

Castle’s work is included in the permanent collections of nearly 50 museums around the world (full list here). If you have an opportunity to travel to one of them, I highly recommend it; two-dimensional photography doesn’t do justice to his work.