These practice joints were cut in both solid wood and Baltic birch plywood—the default material for CNC production furniture. While historically “sacrilegious” to some, Baltic birch’s alternating grain produces exceptionally rigid joints, free of voids, and reveals the logic of Ming construction with unusual clarity.
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Ming furniture has a refined simplicity comparable to Shaker work, but its deeper appeal lies in structural intelligence: dry-fit, reversible systems that achieve grace without over-engineering. Here, two-sided CNC registration enables angled mortises by holding work vertically—adapting hand-tool logic to a 3-axis machine.
This work treats historical joinery as a computational rule set rather than a black-belt tradition—case studies in fixturing, toolpaths, and parametric logic that scale from furniture to architectural assemblies. Ongoing research focuses on refining CNC workflows that preserve hand-cut intelligence inside digital toolpaths.
