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A Singular Vision – ‘X_x_X’ by Ford Bostwick
For his debut solo exhibition in New York, Brooklyn-based designer and artist Ford Bostwick presented a series of four chairs, singular in their materiality and scale.
Ford Bostwick is a multi-hyphenate: a furniture designer who’s also an architectural engineer and sculptor, and he synthesises that highly trained architectural eye and artistic lineage in the furniture he creates. To explain the clear, dedicated and considerate processes inherent in his work, Ford likes to quote the visionary American architect, philosopher and designer R. Buckminster Fuller: “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
For his recent debut solo exhibition, ‘X_x_X’, at Manhattan’s B.Y.B Studio, Ford’s intricate balance of engineering and artistry was embodied in a series of four chairs, each meticulously designed with a singular material and scale. The exhibition’s title – pronounced X by X – was a reference to the square cross-section of materials used in the chairs, which range from 1-inch x 1-inch (25 millimetre x 25 millimetre) sticks to 4-inch x 4-inch (101 millimetre x 101 millimetre) beams.
Those dimensions govern the fabrication of the quartet, a design decision Ford describes accordingly: “Rather than a typical line, where a family of furniture shares a material or visual logic, ‘X_x_X’ takes one parameter and explores it across scale and material in chairs.” Over time, he plans to expand the series to incorporate larger and smaller parts, different materials and other types of furniture.
“Physical materials are embedded with rich cultural and symbolic meaning, so I try not to overwork them.”
Ford works with a range of materials, including metal, timber, plastic and concrete, employing both analog and digital construction techniques. His award-winning Flo chair, for instance, is created with a single piece of thermoformed solid surface material that is normally used for countertops. The stainless steel Domino Side Table is an ode to Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino House and comprises six ‘floating’ plates tethered by four narrow central columns.
For the chairs in ‘X_x_X’ – which come in pine, oak and aluminium – Ford’s intention was to create pieces that were robust, comfortable and portable yet restrained in construction, allowing each chair’s materiality to take precedence. “Physical materials are embedded with rich cultural and symbolic meaning, so I try not to overwork them,” Ford says. “Trees are directly tied to human evolution, both physically and culturally, and aluminium has a complex and dramatic origin story. The ways humans extract, process and reshape materials into everything we know is so interesting to me.”
The exhibition was accompanied by a six-hour video that unfolded in real time and followed the designer-artist during a day in his workshop, offering a fascinating insight into his processes and decision-making. B.Y.B. Studio Co-Founder Justin DeChillo says the video was “a mesmerising experience… where every cut, every joint and every detail contributes to the creation of functional art.”
