TEACHER FEATURE // Buck Jackson's Rational Polyhedra

Buck Jackson is real, real busy. In addition to teaching at 3rd Ward, the designer teaches at CUNY, is opening his own design studio, and he’s a dad. Exhausts us thinking about one of those things.

About that design studio: it’s called Design Office Studio, and Buck says, “The primary focus of the studio is on furniture and skatepark architecture. The ultimate goal on the furniture end is: design, prototype, create finished piece and fabrication documentation, and sell designs to furniture companies. On the skatepark end, I’m working with skater, surfer, and documentary filmmaker Felipe Arias on a skatepark in his home country of Panama.”

Buck describes his design work as “rather rational,” saying, “I’ve been working with polyhedra and simple tension/compression systems in furniture. Right now I’m interested in wooden furniture that moves outside typical assemblages that are free of glue, screws or nails, and can be broken down and re-assembled.”

The Louisiana native had a humble entrance into the furniture design world, taking a job sanding and sweeping the floors of a cabinet shop when he was 18. But three years later, he began a series of assistantships for local artists and crafters, and went on to study at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and Georgia’s Savannah College of Art and Design, before moving to New York in 2005. Here, he worked for the mechanical engineering firm Hoberman Associates, and for a model and prototyping firm “which held denizens such as Frank Gehry, SOM, Calatrava, Sir Norman Foster and Richard Serra,” before beginning the process of opening his studio.

When asked about his run here so far: “The thing I like most about teaching at 3rd Ward is the diversity of the students; I can have a Harvard grad and a bus mechanic in the same class.” 

Meanwhile, make sure to keep up with Jackson's Design Office Studio in two very different incarnations; head on over here or here.

-- Anastasia Friscia