In a workshop beside his home off a quiet country road in Pine Plains, Ari Kardasis shapes wood into forms that hover between sculpture and equation. Surfaces ripple like plotted waves; curves resolve with mathematical precision; textures emerge from patterns he writes in code. Though he resists the label of artist, the work around him suggests a practice animated by both imagination and rigor.
Kardasis creates furniture and housewares informed by what he calls “the elegance of the forms of mathematics.” His work is driven by the desire to take that conceptual elegance and make it tangible. “Above all else, I’m interested in the application of math to design,” Kardasis said. “The beautiful, heirloom furniture that I design specifically for the tastes and needs of each client is the craft. The spirit that I bring to that craft is my experience in, and appreciation for, mathematics.”
His path to woodworking was anything but conventional. Raised in Wellesley, Mass., he attended high school in Cambridge where he excelled in mathematics from an early age, writing code as a teenager before majoring in mathematics at Brown University. After graduating in 2001, he longed for something more tactile and spent time cooking in high-end restaurants. Architecture became the next direction: a master’s degree from Princeton in 2009, followed by research at MIT on computation, design, and alternative forms of organizing space. He earned a master’s in architecture studies there in 2011.
Kardasis moved into technology next, founding a mobile-gaming company called Space Inch, working for startups, and later spent two years as a software engineer at Amazon. But even as he advanced professionally, the mathematical ideas that matter most to him remained unrealized. Woodworking has given him what algorithms and abstractions do not: a way to make those ideas tangible.
“I’ve always made stuff,” Kardasis said. “In architecture school I was constantly building models. I built a 3D printer from scratch 15 years ago. I’ve tackled projects with whatever materials I had on hand. But woodworking provided immediacy and materiality that nothing had before.”
He began making furniture for his Pine Plains home a decade ago, and after leaving Amazon in 2022, he turned to the craft full-time: “Programming is about making things go faster. People in business just want it to work. Software engineers have a higher sense of what ‘doing well’ is. Doing it well matters when making furniture. People see it. They don’t see code.”
With the addition of a computer numerical control (CNC) machine — a computer-guided device that carries out tasks such as cutting, drilling, or milling with exceptional accuracy — Kardasis writes code “to generate patterns mathematically,” which a laser cutter transfers onto wood. In his studio, the surfaces catch light in ways that give motion to the grain. One stool appears to flow where the legs join the seat; a nightstand patterned with a mathematical texture draws the eye across its surface.
“The creative idea is in the furniture,” Kardasis said. He balances shape, structure, and comfort, while recognizing that even with mathematical precision, the material has its own temperament: “You have to respect the will of the wood.”
Sustainability is central to Kardasis’ practice. All of the wood he uses comes from storm-felled or locally recovered trees. Friends and local organizations often alert him when a tree comes down. He works with a sawmill in Falls Village, Conn., to process larger logs. “It’s important to me to be sustainable and have a connection to the source,” Kardasis said. “I’m surrounded by wood, which I incorporate into my work.”
His architectural training shapes his process. Designs often begin as 3D models or coded forms before he produces a rough version and refines it by hand. “I use the 3D capability of the CNC as much as I can,” Kardasis said. A finished piece can take a week or a month depending on the complexity. His fabrication work for artists often informs his furniture, and the furniture, in turn, influences his art collaborations. Kardasis’ textured panels for Nashville-based artist Emily Weiner, he noted, allow him “to take some extremely pure mathematical concepts and directly translate them to built geometry.”
Kardasis has lived in Pine Plains for 10 years and serves as a Planning Board alternate. He and his partner, jewelry designer Erica Weiner, are raising two children, ages 3 and 7. His workdays take shape between school drop-offs and pickups, with long stretches in the studio.
He has grown his business steadily through word of mouth, craft fairs, and friends of friends. Kardasis sells small household objects, including salt cellars, at BES in Millerton and online. Larger commissions — dining tables, a pie safe — remain central to his business. By midyear, he had commissions well into 2026. He plans to exhibit at the Paradise City Arts spring shows in Massachusetts and the Rhinebeck Crafts Festival in June. “For the time being, I’m happy working largely alone in my studio on my land but we’ll see what the coming years have in store,” he said.
Kardasis’ influences span design, architecture, and the digital communities he grew up with. “I’m a child of the internet age and I draw a ton of inspiration from the thousands of people doing and sharing small creative projects,” he said.
What fuels him most, though, is the interplay between creativity and community. “I love making things, and I love engaging with people about it,” he said. “There are lots of creative people in this area.”