We got a chance to visit BC Design Co. in the Bunche neighborhood of West Oakland yesterday. It took a while to arrange this. Student schedules are a nightmare to work around.
Ben Chaloupka is a professional fabricator of architectural metal work in the SF Bay Area. Obviously, he’s doing work at the very high end of design and works with fancy designers to exacting standards. Everything in his show spoke to this.
Ben caught my eye on Instagram last year sometime. I’ve trained myself to see fixture tables in a way many don’t. Legos of the metal world. Suddenly, I found another, like me, out there. Ben was doing some really good work with them on his various channels.
Three students came with me. They’ve learned that any chance to talk with real people doing real things is a very valuable experience. Ben took plenty of time from his day to talk to them about what he’s doing and why he does it like he does. He also talked about what it takes to run a real business like this. I value this especially.
What I also appreciate so much is how much care he places into how his space is organized and how his tools work. There are little details everywhere that come from decades of experience and frustration. You don’t get to see this level of detail put into a shop often.
I made sure to try to take photos of what I could. I’m sure that I missed about 10,000 things but this is a start.
