Case Study: The James Castle House Exhibit

Why we take on work like this

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 our Service Contracts program is for.

Service Contracts are larger-scale fabrication jobs we take on for other mission-driven organizations. They’re also the top rung of our job-readiness pathway. A maker can start with a badge class, apprentice in a discipline, sign on as a laborer on a real project, and eventually work their way up to fabrication lead. Make manages the build and owns 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)
• Fabricator: Make Santa Fe
• Scope: A freestanding birch-plywood exhibition pavilion, plus French-cleat wall systems and exhibit panels for the surrounding gallery.
• Makers:
  • Fabrication & Project Lead: James W. Johnson, Executive Director
  • Project Manager: Vanessa Garcia, Member & Maker
  • CNC Operator: Patrick Reid, Member & Maker
  • Install Fabricator: David O’Connor, Member & Maker

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.

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 is what let a flat sheet of plywood become 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, the look where the deep char near the base eases back toward raw wood. Exposed vertical edges were treated with epoxy paint, and the hardware finishes were matched 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 getting installed more than 800 miles from our shop, the whole pavilion was engineered to break down into smaller components, load onto a trailer, make the 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 the field assembly predictable instead of improvised.

What it means for our makers and our community

A project like this does double duty. The client gets a museum-grade installation built to a designer’s exact intent. And our makers get paid, real-world reps on professional fabrication, running the CNC against a live drawing set, holding a finish to a client’s standard, problem-solving joinery and transport, and seeing a job through from sheet goods to opening day.

That’s the whole point of the pathway: learning that turns into practice, and practice that turns into paid work. Service Contracts also keep skilled fabrication dollars and talent here in the region, which is exactly the kind of local creative economy we’re trying to build.

To the team who put in the hours, and to MASS Design Group and the Boise City Department of Arts & History for trusting us with the build, thank you. This one was a privilege to make.