In the early 1960s Wendell Castle remembered something he had read as a boy about how people used to carve duck decoys.
You glue up a stack of boards into a solid block, then you carve the duck out of the block.
He decided to make furniture that way instead. Not chairs assembled from parts, but chairs carved out of a laminated mass of wood. Nobody was doing it. It is slow, it wastes a great deal of timber, and it produces shapes that no assembled piece of furniture can produce, because the form is no longer limited by the dimensions of a board.
That decision is why he is called the father of American art furniture.
One. Another one who was never a furniture maker.
Born in Emporia, Kansas, in November 1932. A bachelor's degree in industrial design from the University of Kansas in 1958, a master's in 1961.
He came at furniture as a sculptor. He did not learn to make a chair and then get ambitious about form. He understood form first and then discovered that a chair was a thing you could apply it to, which is the reverse of how the craft normally goes and explains almost everything about his work.
He moved to Rochester in 1962 and taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School for American Craftsmen until 1969. In 1980 he opened his own school in Scottsville, New York.
He is usually named alongside Esherick, Nakashima and Maloof as one of the four who made American studio furniture a real thing. Of that four, this series has now covered every one, and not a single one of them trained as a furniture maker.
Two. The technique, and why it is not just a technique.
Stack lamination sounds like a woodworking detail. It is really an argument about where a design comes from.
If you build furniture from boards, the board decides a great deal before you start. Its thickness sets your proportions. Its length sets your span. Curves are expensive, compound curves nearly impossible, and so the vocabulary of most furniture is flat planes meeting at angles, because that is what boards want to do.
Glue up a block and the constraint disappears. You are no longer arranging material. You are removing it, the way a sculptor does, and the shape can be anything you can imagine and reach with a tool.
The cost is real. It is slow, it consumes a lot of wood, and once you cut into a glued-up mass you cannot put it back. But it means the form comes from the idea rather than from the lumber yard.
Worth knowing where the idea came from literally: a decoy is carved out of a glued-up block of boards, which is exactly the process he brought to furniture.
Worth noting where he ended up. In his seventies and eighties, the man who had spent his life carving by hand brought a CNC machine and a robotic arm into the studio, and used them to make work at a scale and complexity his hands could not reach. He was not precious about it. He had spent fifty years insisting the idea mattered more than the method, and then behaved as though he meant it.
Three. The ten rules.
In 1996 Castle published a list he called his ten adopted rules of thumb. It escaped the furniture world almost immediately and turned up in design studios, classrooms and laboratories, because it is not really about wood.
The whole list is worth finding. Four of them earn their place at any bench.
"If you are in love with an idea you are no judge of its beauty or value." The first one, and the hardest. The piece you are most excited about is the one you can least assess. This is the argument for putting work aside for a week before deciding it is finished.
"The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones." Nothing arrives while you wait for it to.
"Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms it was brought to you." A customer asks for a bookshelf. The problem is not a bookshelf.
"If you hit the bullseye every time the target is too near." A run of pieces that all come out exactly as planned is not evidence of skill. It is evidence that you stopped setting yourself anything difficult.
He died in January 2018, aged eighty-five, still working.
What to carry forward
Get the material out of the way of the idea. Stack lamination is one answer. Bent lamination, carving from solid, and green woodworking are others. The point is to notice when a shape is being decided by what was on the rack rather than by you.
Look outside furniture. His whole career came from a decoy-carving technique. The most useful thing you read this year probably will not be about woodworking.
Put it aside before you judge it. Rule one is genuinely useful and genuinely unwelcome.
Fail at something on purpose. If everything you make comes out as intended, move the target.
A note on sources
Biography, dates and the RIT and Scottsville teaching years follow the Museum of Arts and Design's memorial notice and his Wikipedia entry. The duck-decoy origin of his stack lamination is recorded in his own accounts and repeated by MAD and Moderne Gallery. The ten rules were published in 1996 and are reproduced by RIT's Shop One, where he taught.
We have not reproduced any of his work. His estate is recent. The decoy above is somebody else's duck.