Building on a rich history / Standing on the shoulders of giants

In Jacquard’s punched cards (1804): The design intelligence was abstracted from physical shape to coded representation. The punched card didn’t look like the pattern it produced. A human designer still made the aesthetic decisions, but those decisions were encoded in a medium (holes in cards) that had no visual relationship to the finished product. This was a conceptual revolution: the pattern and the thing-it-looks-like were separated for the first time.

The machines themselves were few to begin with. Unlike a molding plane (thousands survive) or a lathe (ubiquitous), a waving engine was a specialized tool that only made economic sense in workshops producing ripple moldings regularly. When demand for new ripple frames disappeared — as gilded frames, then simple wooden frames, then metal section frames became the norm — the machines had no alternative use. They were junked.

German ripple frames tended to be more structurally complex than their Dutch counterparts. Where a Dutch frame might feature a single narrow band of ripple between flat fields, a German frame might layer multiple bands of different wave patterns — Flammleisten alternating with Wellenleisten, narrow fine ripples next to broader, bolder undulations. The effect was architectural, almost musical — a rhythm of textures building from the outer edge of the frame to the sight edge.

Under candlelight — the only artificial light available in 17th-century interiors — this modulating effect was magnified. The ripple surface shimmered and shifted as candles flickered and the viewer moved, creating a zone of gentle visual activity around a still image. The effect was subtle, almost subliminal, and it was perfectly calibrated to the intimate scale of Dutch domestic interiors, where paintings hung at close range in small rooms and were viewed by candlelight during the long northern European evenings.

The subtle, alive quality of a hand-pulled Moxon cut — that almost-but-not-quite-perfect regularity that catches candlelight so beautifully — was lost.

The machine that requires a craftsman produces work that bears the mark of a craftsman. That is not a flaw. It is the point.

They created transformed the way light played across the frame.

The Kasemann plane is a reminder that our work has deeper roots than we usually think about.