Engineering the Impossible: Art Meets Formula 1 on Fifth Avenue

Photographer Jamie Lubetkin test drives Chaise Longue at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Photo by J. Scott Orr

It’s called Chaise Longue, but this thing sitting here on the 19th floor of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, above Fifth Avenue, is nothing like a cushy settee. For one thing, it seems way too fragile. For another, it seems to be moving at speed.

A single dark fragile ribbon, it looks like a giant strip of photographic film, bent at right angles at the bottom but assuming a more organic contour on top. It seems engineered for speed, though its purpose is to remain still. Lacking visible joints, legs or braces, Chaise Longue hardly seems capable of supporting its own weight let alone that of a human body.

Light was streaming in through a floor-to-ceiling gallery window the other afternoon when photographer Jamie Lubetkin and I came by Carpenters Workshop to give the furniture, or the sculpture, a test drive. Chaise Longue was up to the challenge, ably supporting the combined weight of Jamie and her camera. And, Jamie reported, the thing was surprisingly comfortable.

Chaise Longue is made of carbon fiber, an incredibly sturdy substance that usually hides beneath the painted skin of a race car or inside the wing of an aircraft. In Lightness of Form, the exhibition of objects created by British designer Terence Woodgate and race car designer John Barnard now open at Carpenters Workshop, carbon fiber becomes the stuff of impossible objects that are at once pieces of furniture and works of art.

Designer Terence Woodgate, left, and race car designer John Barnard at work. Photo courtesy Carpenters Workshop

In an interview with White Hot, Woodgate said his collaboration with Barnard, whose work with carbon fiber revolutionized Formula 1 racing, has yielded a collection of furniture/sculpture that pushes the limits of carbon fiber and quite possibly the limits of minimalism itself. While they are both designers, Woodgate is the artist, Barnard the engineer. Woodgate is the one most likely to push the boundaries of the possible, Barnard the pragmatist who must enforce the substance’s limits.

“Carbon fiber gives us the opportunity to create this minimal aesthetic and push it to the extreme,” Woodgate said. “I'm always pushing the envelope, and he (Barnard) sometimes has to pull me back and say, ‘well, we can't do that, that's not how carbon fiber is best utilized.’...For John, being behind something means the engineering is good and correct. For me, it's the aesthetic,” Woodgate said.

Woodgate said Chaise Longue is “designed to flex slightly to make up for the lack of upholstery. It kind of hugs you, and you can rock slightly within it. It's not far off the position you sit in on a racing car, so there was that cross-fertilization of design (with Barnard).”

Chaise Longue by designer Terence Woodgate and race car engineer John Barnard at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

Woodgate has spent decades stripping furniture to its essentials, earning a reputation as one of Britain’s leading industrial designers through work that demonstrates his ample gift for subtraction. Barnard, meanwhile, comes from a different world entirely. An engineer steeped in Formula 1 racing, Barnard disrupted the sport and much of high-performance engineering in 1981 through his design of McLaren’s MP4/1, the first race car built around a full carbon fiber composite monocoque. 

Woodgate and Barnard began collaborating after they met via a program of the Royal Society of Arts, where they are both Royal Designers for Industry. They bonded over their shared interest in new materials and their skill at removing stuff, Barnard subtracting weight from race cars, Woodgate stripping bulk from furniture.

“We set about designing a table in carbon fiber, because that seemed like a nice structural and artistic challenge. I wanted it to look really, really thin, to become just the surface. We got on really well….John's an absolute perfectionist, and I'd like to consider myself a bit of a perfectionist too, but my perfection is more about the aesthetics,” Woodgate said.

Wedge Desk is another piece that demonstrates both Woodgate’s masterful minimalism and Barnard’s carbon fiber wizardry. It’s an impossibly thin horizontal slab bent at right angles to create what appears to be a simple plane. Imagine the president in the Oval Office seated behind the Resolute Desk. Now picture the opposite of that. The Wedge Desk’s angled geometry and the carbon fiber’s rigidity allow the desk to skirt the visual heaviness of an ordinary desk. But unlike Chaise Longue, the Wedge Desk comes with a surprise. Looking at it from a guest’s point of view it appears to be a long, thin slab of material bent at right angles, but seated behind the desk an optical illusion is revealed as the desk’s three planes widen by several inches, enough to accommodate two drawers.

A secret door opens on the Wedge Desk, by designer Terence Woodgate and race car engineer John Barnard. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

“It had to be a working desk, in the same way the table was a working table, and the cabinet is a working cabinet: they have to provide the function of furniture,” Woodgate said. “I didn't want to compromise, though of course you have to, to some extent, in terms of size and dimensions. But I didn't want to compromise the aesthetics, nor the use of the piece, it had to be functional,” Woodgate said.

Another piece, Carbon Chair, again demonstrates the collaboration’s economy. Four planes meet at crisp right angles to form a boxy black volume that, after a few moments, reveals itself as a chair stripped to its bare minimum. It’s the kind of chair a stick figure might sit in in a Dada animation. The chair never really abandons its geometric severity, even when someone sits in it. At the same time, though, it doesn’t become minimalist sculpture. It remains unmistakably a chair, but one that has been reduced to something like an architectural diagram. 

Carbon Chair and Fine Line Console are bathed in light at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

Woodgate has long been known for his devotion to minimalism. Earlier projects drew inspiration from American minimalist artist Donald Judd and Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida. But while he looks to artists for inspiration, Woodgate said his line between art and furniture is blurry, if it exists at all.

“I know Donald Judd kind of separated his furniture from his sculpture, his art, but in the end I don't think there is a difference. It's the same person, the same aesthetics, the same eye, and in many respects the same desire. There are different constraints you have to adhere to, and that can be more challenging in many respects, but for me I don't think there's any difference.” he said.

Working with a breakthrough substance like carbon fiber has allowed Woodgate to go where earlier minimalist sculptors have not. Carbon fiber has been around for more than a century. In fact, Thomas Edison used carbonized cotton and bamboo filaments in his early light bulbs. Scientific advances, mostly during the 1960s, transformed carbon fiber into what it is today: a super‑strong, super‑light material made by heating plastic fibers until they turn into pure carbon threads. These properties allow exceptionally thin surfaces to become structural members so what would appear implausibly fragile in wood or steel becomes entirely possible.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery has built much of its identity around the nexus of art and utility. Since its founding in a former carpenter’s workshop in London’s Chelsea, the gallery has featured designers and artists whose functional objects end up in museums, private collections and art fairs alongside traditional sculpture. Lightness of Form is the latest statement in Carpenters’ argument that utility need not diminish artistic ambition. 

Visitors consider the works of art/furniture on display at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

New York is an especially revealing setting. Within view of Midtown's towers of steel, glass and concrete, these pieces are at once of a piece with the architectural wonders outside the gallery’s windows and in defiance of them. 

Minimalism has often carried an emotional distance, asking viewers to accept and admire its discipline and austerity. This work is different. It is advertised as functional and, yes, it is. When Jamie reclined on Chaise Longue the other day, she wasn’t interrupting Woodgate’s art, she was completing it. 

Lightness of Form is on view through October 18 at Carpenters Workshop, 693 Fifth Avenue, New York City.