Architectural Woodworking - A Wedding in the Mansion

CNC?????

Quick, find a bar of soap and wash your mouth out (or your fingertips and keyboard)!!!
Perish the thought. The CNC carved detritus (mostly from China) is already so abundant as to bury us. No mas!

If you want elegance, do it right with hand carved material.

Bob,
I am a huge fan of hand carving but even in the 19th century, when these mansions were built, the huge demand for carved moldings, details, friezes & etc meant pervasive use of pattern carving machines, stamped moldings, and other stuff. The other thing is that there are carvings and there are carvings. most CNC carvings I have seen are BAD, but there is no reason why they cannot be made better, and to make the better you do need a real carver at the helm. And I would much rather someone builds more buildings with fancy carved interiors with machine aid then being scared off the project because of the cost of hiring a talented carver to carve 3000 ft of identical molding.

I take it the carving above the marble is on the second floor. Looks as crude as my efforts at architectural carving. The other carvings look exquisite. Wish you showed more pictures!

Dan,
I'm not positive, but possibly not. One of the things that is really interesting about the mansion is that as a whole the decoration is magnificent, but when you look at the details the stuff just isn't what we see in museums. And that I think is really important. Museums usually reflect the best work around. This work is more typical of large mansion projects. Some of it great, all of it pretty good, but you don't have your "A" list carvers working on 500 feet of identical molding. Also there is 130 years of wear and tear on the piece. (which is why in museums they don't let you touch anything)

I could see a compromise - using CNC to do the basic blocking for the carvings, leaving the final/fine detail for the hand carver.

Paul has a reasonably good suggestion. Use CNC to do the mundane work, especially with long runs of molding and an artist adds a hand made refinement.

THANKS Joel, for showing us this beautiful work!

During the hayday of furniture making in the 1800's, most of the detail carving was roughed out by duplicator then finished by hand by professional carvers, exactly as Paul suggests. In Grand Rapids MI, at that time the furniture making capitol of the US, there were over 300 carvers employed by the various furniture companies. If you look at the best of it in museums, it looks and feels hand carved, because it really is. My guess is that is what happened at the Palace. Perhaps the master carvers did the first floor, journeymen the second, etc.? Sadly,a lot of the junk out there today which is called "carving" bears little or no "touch" from a real carver, and it looks it too!!