This sculpture box began as an improvisation, developing from the inside out. I started with a serene pavilion and then decided to imbed it in layers of boxes. As it grew, the idea of “sanctuary” grew with it, and it became a meditation on what is a sanctuary.

From the outside in, the outermost box splits in two down the center line. The next box, with all the stairways that bypass the sanctuary splits into two sections about two-thirds of the way up. The next box sheltering the pavilion splits apart on the diagonal. Finally the pavilion lifts off to access the single compartment.

The outside box is of andiroba and bird’s eye maple, and measures 13”high by 12” wide by 12”deep. The next box is made of figured makore and bird’s eye maple, and the inner box is made of pearwood and curly English maple. The pavilion is 6” tall, of birch, and it sits on a box of dyed English sycamore.

Situated in the middle of a rocky crevasse on Mount Sinai, this remarkable monastery was begun in the sixth century on the supposed site where Moses first beheld the burning bush.  A church was built near the still flourishing bush, and a monastic community soon sprang up around it.

Eventually the church was enlarged, a library was built to house precious manuscripts and icons, and a mosque was hastily constructed in the tenth century to discourage any attack from the Fatimid caliphs.  Other buildings accrued, and a protective wall was finally built around the complex.

Today the monastery complex is a fascinating hodge-podge of religious and utilitarian structures from different eras. The church is now a basilica, and just to the right of it is the mosque with its misshapen minaret. To the right of that, along the wall, is the guest wing, and along the back wall is the modern era library and the hall of icons. Along the wall on the left is the building where the monks live, and next to it the refectory. The buildings in the center house various offices and chapels.

One of the things that fascinates me about monasteries architecturally is that, though they usually begin with an ordered and logically laid-out design, they soon become almost chaotic conglomerates of heteroclite structures in unlikely juxtaposition to each other, where clearly only the denizens can find their way. I have no idea of the purpose most of these little buildings serve. Whatever their actual uses, for me they provide ample opportunities for hidden compartments. There are a total of thirteen compartments in the buildings and under the floor of this box.

Mahogany and Basswood, 16" wide by 12" deep by 6 1/4" tall

Chand Baori, the largest and deepest of the many incredible step wells of Rajasthan in India, was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by King Chanda. It has thirteen stories of double flights of stairs leading down into the earth on three sides of a square structure, with over 3500 steps in total.On the fourth side are multiple stories of temple pavilions. The step well served both as a very effective water collection system and a community gathering place for many centuries until the arrival of the British. After a long period of deterioration it is finally being recognized as a national treasure and is being maintained if not restored. It is the inspiration for the fifth box in my Indian Step Well Series.

Stairs cover three sides of the square structure of the step well. On the fourth side is a complex of several stories of pavilions where the royal family could relax while their subjects fetched water. The water could be reached at any level, no matter the season or drought conditions, and it was always 5 - 6 degrees cooler at the bottom of the well than at the top.

Of the thirteen courses of stairs in this box, two are "under water" but visible beneath the watery glass at the bottom. Chand Baori is approximately 100 feet deep. The box is 10 1/2 inches deep, making it the deepest step well box in the world. There are 14 compartments. Two drawers pull out from the center of the pavilions. Seven drawers pull out from the backside of the box. If you pull out the top drawers, you can peer in through the columns to the stairs inside.

The box measures 12 1/2" h - 19"w-19"d,  and the materials are walnut, bird's eye maple, and glass.

This sculpture box began with a hodge-podge of inspirations: depictions of walled towns in medieval paintings, labyrinths and mazes, medieval reliquaries, and my own desire to wander creatively after wandering in Tuscany. I had no drawings to start with, just a vague notion of a whimsical, rather chaotic multi-level structure with arches, stairs and towers. The church façade imposed itself after a look at Orvieto, and of course the central tower is a nod in the direction of Florence.

The process was entirely improvisational with much use of cardboard and scotch-tape. The finished box has four entrances, ten stairways, thirty arches, nine columns, and two towers. There are six compartments in this sculpture box. Four of the façades pull forward to reveal hidden drawers, and the tops of both towers lift off.  The woods are figured cherry and maple. 15”h – 15”w – 12”d.

Commissioned by Benito Mussolini in 1938 and designed by Giuseppe Terragni to dominate the Roman Forum, the Danteum was never built. It was conceived of as a monument to Dante and hence, by association, to the glory of Italian culture. It is perhaps the purest example of modern fantasy architecture, as it is designed to be an allegorical and geometrical translation in three dimensional space of the journey of Dante's Divine Comedy.

One enters the Danteum by climbing a set of stairs and proceeding down a long narrow passage that leads to an open couryard (above left). Here the metaphoric journey begins as one heads into a thicket of one hundred columns - the "dark wood" of the opening lines of the Divine Comedy. Eventually one discovers a stairway leading to a small antechamber that opens onto a large dark hall representing Hell (above right). The floor is made up of a series of seven descending squares in a spiral based on the golden ratio,  a geometric equation that has fascinated mathematicians and artists for millennia.

From Hell one climbs another set of stairs and enters a large, airy room representing Purgatory (above left). Its floor plan is based on the same golden ratio as Hell, but with the seven squares ascending, an arrangement that the roof mirrors with seven open squares. One leaves this room by a narrow stairway that leads to the Paradise room (above right), a light-filled space with thirty-three glass pillars supporting a glass roof. The journey is complete, and finally, from this room a long narrow staircase leads back down to street level and the entrance to the building.

In the original plan for the building, the space below the Purgatory and Hell rooms was to be a large library dedicated to Dante and The Divine Comedy. I chose this area for a secret drawer. Three of the roofs also lift off, bringing the total number of compartments to four. The box measures 17"l x 13"w x 5"h. The wood is bird's eye maple.

As the Bible story tells it, the people of Babel were so proud they thought they could build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. God decided to punish their hubris and caused it that one morning the people of Babel woke up speaking many different languages. They could no longer communicate, and the tower was left unfinished.

I decided to start this sculpture not knowing how I would finish it - or not. There are four main gates and four secondary gates on the first level, four entrances on the second level, and then the spiral climb to heaven begins.

Though the base of the structure is a pure octagon, when the spiral begins the outer shape becomes an octagon of unequal sides. There are four ascending spirals. Each level of the sculpture has an octagonal tray compartment inside, and there is a total of four compartments.

At the top of the sculpture, chaos has set in. The inner structure is revealed in its interrupted state, and the outer shell is also unfinished and has lost its relation to the inner core. One sees the unfinished state of things - exposed joists, wall braces, and some building debris.

Inside the box, the ground level of the tower is a large octagonal hall with sixteen pillars. The view on the right is a bird's eye view of the octagonal hall and ramparts. The sculpture measures 14"h - 18"w - 18"d. The woods are curly maple, walnut, and dyed birch.

The Franciscan monastery of Le Celle was founded by the saint himself on a hillside outside the walls of Cortona, Italy, in 1221. The site is dramatic – a deep ravine carved by a rushing stream divides a jumble of dry stone buildings on one side from terraces of gardens and orchards linked by ramps and stairways on the other. Three bridges cross the ravine at different heights.

Le Celle immediately enthralled me when I visited it, and I took a few photos, wondering if I could ever use it as the starting point for a box. Several years later, I made my box. The two sides of the box are separate structures, with the bridges belonging to the terraced side. I chose to leave the woods un-oiled to suggest the dry feeling of the place, and I did not try to replicate the ravine bed or rushing stream but focused on abstracting the man-made aspects – the buildings and terraces - while trying to capture the feeling of precipitous height and nestled enclosure.

There are nine compartments in all – six within the buildings on the left and three beneath the terraces on the right. The overall dimensions of the box are 9” high by 20” wide by 21” deep.

My fourth box in the Step Well Series is based on an example from a nineteenth century palace where it is more a sort of private cloistered cistern than a public step well. I tried to keep to the very graceful proportions of the space and the number of levels and arched bays, while changing other design and decorative features. The top of the box lift off and beneath are three stacked levels, each a tray, connected by stairways. The outer wood is figured cherry and the inner wood is English maple. The box is 11"h - 10 1/2"w - 12"d. 

This box is a little architectural jumble that is also a maze. It has an entrance stairway on each of its four sides. Each of these stairways leads to a landing and then to other stairways, creating multiple routes, a few of which lead all the way to the little pavilion at the pinnacle of the structure. The architecture, with its stairways and arches and pavilions, is reminiscent of the architectural art of M. C. Escher.

Each landing is a cover to a compartment. There are seven compartments around the outside, six in the interior, and one large inner compartment accessed by lifting off the entire central section of the box. The outer wood is striped mahogany and the inner is curly maple. The box is 13"h - 16"w - 13"d.

This box is inspired by one of the most stunning of the step pyramids of the Yucatán, Chichen Itza. The pyramid has four staircases leading up nine levels to a square temple. There are three compartments. The woods are fumed oak, ash, and basswood. The dimensions are 11"h - 16"w - 16"d.

This fourth box in my series inspired by the work of M.C.Escher is closely based on a specific drawing, “Other World”. Like the first three boxes in the series, this one is about multiple orientations of the same tableau.  The drawing shows a lunar landscape viewed through Roman arches in three different orientations. I have substituted urns for the rather disturbing bald birds in the drawing, and hanging ball for the hanging horns, but otherwise the idea and the architecture are substantially the same. In translating from two dimensions to three, I decided to contain the scene in a box that one looks down into, after removing a cover, as the next images show.

The woods are lacewood, quilted maple, birch, and dyed English maple. The dimensions of the scene are 8" - 6" - 8".  The box is made of pommele sapele, and its dimensions are 13" - 11" -  10 1/2".

I couldn't resist the amazing staircases of the famous Ziggurat of Ur. Only the first layer of this ancient temple still exists out in the desert in Iraq, so this box is an imagined and slightly abstracted reconstruction of what the original building might have looked like.

There are two types of mahogany used here, and three compartments. The stairs act as a pull for a drawer that pulls out. Each of the top sections lifts off to reveal a compartment. The drawer and two compartments are lined with rust-colored silk.The dimensions are 10"h - 16"w - 17"d.

This box is inspired by photographs of a quarry in Vermont. I find quarries interesting because, like step wells, they are a type of inverted architecture, but they have an organic, almost unplanned feel to them. The quarry in this box is made of unfinished eucalyptus wood and has a pool of colored glass. Like most quarries it is strewn with rubble - the debris is removable. The right section of the top lifts off. The compartment underneath is lined with blue silk the same color as the quarry pool. The body of the box is mahogany and measures 6" high by 16" long by 12" deep.

The early Roman Saint Jerome was canonized for making the first translation of the Bible into Latin from the Aramaic and Greek. He thus became the patron saint of translators and librarians. He was a great scholar and became a favorite subject for medieval and Renaissance artists who often depicted him working in his study. My favorite of these depictions of St. Jerome in his study is by the Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina. It shows an oddly independent construction of a wooden platform with stairs, a desk, bench and shelves, more like a stage set than a study, and - the oddest part - plunked right down in the middle of a church. Saint Jerome is seated at his desk reading a manuscript and surrounded by all sorts of fascinating paraphernalia while his pet lion wanders in the distance.

This bizarre but inviting structure and its surroundings so intrigued me that I thought I'd see if I could make a box out of it. I decided to minimize the clutter and to focus on trying to capture the sense of perspective that is really what this painting is about. Though finished on all sides, this box is more a diorama than a full sculpture like my other boxes. To capture the sense of perspective in the painting, I decided to make the floor have a rake of 25 degrees and to foreshorten all the structures so that the space would appear much deeper than it actually is. This involved making all the structures angle back to an imaginary vanishing point. I tried to stay true to the dimensions in the painting and to keep the clutter to a minimum, suggesting his scholarly life with just a few objects.

The dimensions of the box are 16" high by 13 inches wide by 10 inches deep. The outer wood is cherry, and the inner woods are mahogany for the study, bird's eye maple for the floor, and bog oak for the church interior. There are three compartments. One of the comparments is in the desk, which lifts off. A second compartment is a drawer that is attached to the backside of the shelves and fits into a sleeve at the back of the box behind the study.

The incredible step well at Agrasen in Rajastan is the inspiration for my third box based on Indian step wells. Unlike the many square, symmetrical step wells, this one is long and narrow with the well at the end of a very long staircase. I used the basic design of Agrasen for this box, but added elements from other step wells.

There are three stairways entering the step well from ground level, and the octagonal well at the end is four stories deep. In the actual step well the water might reach as high as the top level of archways in the wet season. There are four compartments under the top surface of the box. The whole top half of the box lifts off, and underneath in the bottom half is a tray that lifts out and three more compartments, making a total of eight compartments.

The outer wood is pommele sapele and the inner wood is English maple. The box is 7"h - 22"l -10"w.

This box, my third exploration of Escher's peculiar spatial sensibilities, is not based on a specific image but, like my second box in the series, begins with the idea of a cube with identical faces in different orientations.The view here is one face of the box, which is made up of two sides of the cube. This face is repeated two more times on the other four sides, each time in a different orientation, so that there is no single direction that is “up" - hence the stand. The three faces meet in three intertwining stairways at the top. Hard to explain, a nightmare to make.

To access the single inner compartment, there is a section of each tableau that is a lock. When each of these is slid sideways, the entire top section of the box can separate from the bottom section, revealing an inner cube. The woods are quilted maple and bird’s eye walnut. The box itself measures 10h" - 10"w - 10"d, and in it's stand is 12"h - 12"w - 12"d.

The step well at Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur is the inspiration for my second box based on Indian step wells. It is less a step well in the sense of a carefully designed symmetrical structure, and more a huge reservoir with terraced sides carved out of the hills overlooking Jaipur, and dammed at one end. There is nothing else like it. Water collected from the hills is funneled into the step well at the far end by a sluice, viewable through the octagonal well hole, and cascades down divided channels into the terraced cistern. At the near end is the dam topped by stairways to a promontory where one can view both the step well on one side and the valley below on the other.

On this near end where the water enters the step well there is a drawer which pulls out and has a tray that lifts off. Behind this drawer are two secret compartments. On the opposite end the top of the dam lifts off to reveanl the fourth compartment.The outer wood is cocobolo and the inner wood is mahogany. The water is grey-dyed English sycamore. The box is 5 1/2"h - 19"l - 12"w.

This box, unlike the first in the Escher series, is not based on a specific work by Escher but is inspired by his way of treating space from multiple perspectives. The box is basically a cube that has a facade that is repeated three times, each time in a different orientation. Thus there is no one direction that is "up", so the box sits in a stand as if on its point.

There is a small compartment in each of the corner towers and a box cube contained within the structure. To access the cube, one of the bottom faces of the box must be removed, and then the inner cube box can be lifted out, with the result that one can look through the open structure of the box . The outer wood is pommele sapele and the inner is curly ash. In it's stand the box measures 14"h -14"w - 14"d. It has four compartments.

This is my first box inspired by the incredible step wells of northern India. Each box begins with a specific step well, but I then adapt the design to include elements from other step wells and my imagination. This is a classic square step well with three levels of stairs and several pavilions around a central well. The surface or ground level of the box has four stairways leading down into the well, and then eight stairways lead down to the next level and six more stairways lead down to the central pool.

One has to imagine that the structure of the box is below ground level and that only the four little pavilions and the entrances to the stairways are visible from the ground. Inside is a two-level temple and a small pavilion. Each side of the box has a drawer that pushes out from the inside, and there are twelve compartments on the top level. There are also two secret inner compartments. The outer wood is figured makore and the inner wood is bird's eye maple. The box is 11"h - 14 "w - 14"d.

This sculpture box is inspired by the 1919 German Expressionist horror film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. It seeks to capture the eerie feeling of the movie sets where everything is off-kilter, expressing the narrator’s deranged state of mind. The sculpture is in the form of the small medieval hill town where the story takes place, and it references the sets of various scenes in the movie, including the town square, the mountebank's caravan and stage, the town clerk's office and the heroine's bedroom, all at different scales.

Medieval Christians kept their holiest relics - bones of saints and pieces of the True Cross and Crown of Thorns - in reliquaries that often looked like miniature churches or holy buildings. These were my inspiration for this sculpture. It is actually a set of two separate box sculptures. The upper sculpture, Heaven, sits on the lower, Hell, much as many of the early Christian churches were built atop the ruins of earlier pagan sanctuaries.

Heaven” is composed of four "rooms", each with stairways and balconies that open onto the adjoining rooms. Each room is symmetrical, though the entire composition is not. All the stairways act as pulls for the six drawers contained in this box under the floors. The wood is a highly figured maple. Heaven measures 16"h - 14"w - 15"d.

Though medieval reliquaries were the resting place for revered and holy relics, I see no reason why relics of a darker and more profane nature should not have their own special place. Every face of this little Hell is symmetrical and has two drawers that can be opened from the outside, as well as one that opens into the inner courtyard. Hell is made of stump and plain walnut, and has a total of thirteen compartments. It measures 9"h - 15"w - 15"d.

The combined dimensions of the two sculptures are 25"h - 15 'w - 15 'd.

This third box in the series is based on a specific etching by Piranesi and explores its ambiance of subterranean darkness and subtle oppression. The grills of the cells all lead to compartments.

The stairs pull forward to reveal a drawer, and all the floors lift off. There is also a secret compartment in the back of the box. There are five compartments in all. The woods are crotch and blond mahogany. The box is 11"h - 18"w -  12"d.

This second box in the series based on Gian-Battista Piranesi's remarkable collection of etchings of imaginary prisons is inspired by the verticality, monumentality, and bizarre symmetry of some of Piranesi's prisons.

There are two compartments under the floors. The entrance stairs on both sides pull out to access the drawers. There is also a hidden compartment behind one of the drawers.The outer wood is walnut and the inner wood is figured maple. The box measures 18"h - 14"w - 14"d.

Gian-Battista Piranesi's fantastic series of etchings of imaginary prisons has always intrigued and delighted me, and also had a strong influence on M.C.Escher. They are the inspiration for this series of boxes. This first box of the series aims to capture the sprawling, almost chaotic sense of some of the etchings.

There are three compartments on the 'ground floor', and a fourth in the central 'keep'. The outer wood is cherry and the inner is quilted maple. The box measures 11"h - 16"w - 10"d.

This box pays tribute to the famous Dutch artist and mind-bender M.C. Escher, and is based closely on his famous multiple stairway drawing called "Relativity". Looking closely at the etching, I realized it was based on three intersecting planes, like the corner of a room, with staircases on each wall, split so that they could appear to lead in two directions. It remained only to make the box!

There are five drawers in the outer walls.  As there are three possible ways to 'read' the box, it sits on the intersecting point of the three walls. The box is made of cherry with an outer wood of pommele sapele.

This sculpture box is a study in three different scales of steps. It is an interactive work, in the sense that the individual components of the sculpture can be moved around into interesting and different configurations, making the steps lead in different directions. The nine component parts lift off, revealing nine compartments of different sizes.

The overall dimensions of the sculpture are 12’’ - 12” - 12”, and the woods are French walnut and curly maple.

This box began with my asking myself the question, “How do you start with a cube and end up with a collection of buildings?” - basically how do you divide up a cube into several sections and have them look like buildings. This is the result.

The cube faces are made up of a patchwork of nine squares of fumed eucalyptus. As you separate the sections from each other, the inner faces of curly English maple reveal themselves. The cube eventually separates into three distinct boxes, each of which is an abstracted building of three stories. Each “building” has three drawers. The cube itself measures 9’” in each direction and has a total of nine compartments.