The "father of the art furniture movement", Rochester Institute of Technology.

Wendell Castle (1932 – 2018) was arguably the leading American furniture designer of his generation, but he mostly thought of himself as a sculptor. Instead of using traditional joinery techniques, he created monumental and organic forms that are totally free from the logic of conventional furniture.

At Chatsworth, a trio of Castle’s works are gathered at the edge of a pool. All are three-person seats cast in bronze but with varying compositions.

In A New Seeing, the seats are cut through at odd angles, while in Illusion-Reality-Truth, they rest on vertical finger-like forms. Temptation has a single long seat, riding like a boat over waves.

Castle’s bronze seats echo the forms of the yew trees surrounding the historic Ring Pond, providing welcome spaces to sit while also entering into a dialogue with the herms and stone stools, originally designed by William Kent for the garden at Chiswick – a connection across time to the origins of design as we understand it today.

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