Case Study: The James Castle House Exhibit

Why I did this work

As executive director of Make Santa Fe, I instituted a program that creates opportunity for young and new makers. Most of what gets made at Make happens one maker at a time. But some projects are simply too big for any single person to carry; they need a crew, a schedule, a quality process, and someone accountable for the whole thing. That’s what the program I created is for

These projects became the top rung of the job-readiness pathway. A maker can start with a class, apprentice in a discipline, sign on as a laborer on a real project, and eventually work their way up to fabrication lead. I managed the build and the quality. The makers get something you can’t get from a class alone: the experience of delivering professional work, on a deadline, for a real client.

This spring, that work took us all the way to Boise.

The project at a glance

  • Client: MASS.
  • Venue: The James Castle House
  • Lead Designer: MASS Design Group (Santa Fe)
  • Scope: A freestanding birch-plywood exhibition pavilion, plus French-cleat wall systems and exhibit panels for the surrounding gallery.
  • Crew:

The James Castle House is the preserved home of James Castle, the self-taught Deaf artist who made his work in rural Idaho. The new exhibit explores Deaf history and the ways institutions and the built environment have tried to shape, control, and care for communities, and the ways those communities have endured anyway. Our job was to build the centerpiece that holds it all together.

What we built

At the heart of the gallery sits a curved, freestanding pavilion: a ring of tall, tapering vertical fins that rise from the floor, wrapped on the inside with a smooth skin of bent birch plywood. From the outside, the structure reads as a rigid, confining wall. Step inside, and it opens up into an intimate gathering space, a room within the room, lined with a continuous printed mural.

That transformation is the whole idea. The design, by MASS Design Group, treats the wall’s vertical fins with shou sugi ban, the Japanese technique of charring wood, so the surface echoes the blackened scars of a forest after a fire. It’s a metaphor that runs through the entire exhibit: the historical attempts to suppress both forest ecosystems and the Deaf community across the twentieth century, and the resilience of both. Forests come back after fire. So does community.

Benches built into the gathering circle and along the performance-viewing wall round it out, sized intentionally to welcome a diversity of bodies.

How We Made It

This was a digital-fabrication and fine-woodworking job in equal measure, and it leaned hard on the CNC shop and the finishing bench.

CNC milling. The curved geometry doesn’t tolerate eyeballing. We cut the structural rings and the tapered fins from 3/4″ Baltic birch plywood on the ShopBot, working straight from the fabrication set so every part nested, repeated, and fit on assembly. Cutting the curves on the CNC turned a flat sheet of plywood into a true circle in the gallery.

Shou sugi ban. Every wood component of the freestanding structure got the char treatment, finished to a uniform tone agreed on during mock-up review and sealed for durability. We dialed in the gradient on test pieces first: deep char near the base easing back toward raw wood. We treated exposed vertical edges with epoxy paint and matched the hardware finishes to the char so the fasteners disappear.

Bent plywood skin. On the inside face of the circular frame, we wrapped 1/4″ plywood, bending it around the curve to create the clean, continuous interior surface that carries the mural.

French cleats and exhibit panels. Beyond the pavilion, we fabricated the French-cleat systems and panels for the wall-hung displays throughout the gallery so the curators could mount text, drawings, maps, and framed work cleanly and rehang as needed.

Built to travel and come apart. Because this was being installed more than 800 miles from our shop, we engineered the whole pavilion to break down into smaller components, load onto a trailer, drive to Boise, and reassemble on site as a floating structure on top of the foundation. Mock-ups, joinery details, and a component schedule kept field assembly predictable rather than improvised.