Lennart Van Uffelen says that functionality kills the fun, but it could also be said that killing functionality is fun, but not, kill the funny functionality.

This ultimate transformer table was designed for the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum by the dutch design firm Studio Makkink and Bey. Makkink an architect, and Bay a graphic designer, run a multidisciplinary design studio where  boundaries are broken down with lateral thinking that produces original design ideas such as this. A trestle is made to be adaptable and mobile, but this one is even more so. This table has multiple configurations, regular table, extended table, small individual writing table or easel.

The main material is HPL (high pressure laminate) and it  comes in different colours. These can be interchanged and joined with metal edge pieces, that extend the multi-functionalism as they can also be used as a pen holder with the easel configuration. The unused parts of the system can be stored away on a stacker system that has the coloured table tops facing outwards like an attractive panel. The HPL legs are another element that looses the corporate feel that tables designed for collective use have,with functional metal tubes.

I imagine that the one big frustration that you’d feel with this poly-functioning system, is when you want to take a table top from the stack, and your favourite colour is at the bottom, so you end up having to make do with another colour instead.

Thierry Dreyfus is renowned for his use of light in his work as an artist and art director, particular for fashion shows. One of the characteristics of his dramatic use of light is is the vast heavy darkness with accompanies it. This comes to play in the Hommage table. A massive black aluminium I beam, fit to carry the heavens split down the middle, to form two independent pieced that can be moved separately, revealing the rugged gold surface of it’s essence shining through.

Each side weighing only 100kg even though it appears to weigh tonnes. This contrast adds to the dual aspects of  the Hommage table, light and dark, calm and violent, the power of one aspect accentuating the other. Following through on  this logic perhaps the perfect setting for this limited edition piece would be in some cheep shed out of town?

Marjan Van Aubel comes from a family of chemists, So when says that she can make seven tables out of one existing table, I imagine a process like Disney’s Fantasia with alchemy. The actual process is a little less clean and glamorous, with the resultant  animation that’s a little more  Frankenstein.

The original wooden table is shaved down and these shavings are mixed with a glue and pigments, which foam up irregularly as they are pushed into a shape, then dry into a solid form. This method creates the first six tables and the seventh  is from the slivers of wood that could not pass through the machine but I have been unable to find any images of this one.

The original inspiration for this technique was developed with Jamie Shaw using bio-resin to use up the waste wood and sawdust which can account for 50-80% of the original wood in the manufacturing process. It’s a similar inspiration to recycling work-shop waste that was behind the design of  Thôrne & Johnsson’s Keep table, which also has a original aesthetic stemming from the way that it’s made.

photos by Wai Ming Ng

Nogi means foot in polish, it’s an other design from Oskar Zeita using FiDU technology. What I particularly like about the nogi table base is it’s economy of structure with a single beam running between both trestles. In the version that I saw here at last years Maison et objet there is a table top using another technology developed by Zeita where two or three perforated sheets of thin steel are joined to make a strong rigid lightweight sheet. There is some thing sort of praying mantis like about this base, and for me it is one of his less bulbous, lightest most economic designs.

Norm Architects from Denmark were inspired by maritime objects when designing the raft table which is constructed of welded steel and sandblasted oak. Yet when ever I saw a publicity photo for it I thought it more akin to sleek podish ifurniture than something found attached to a buoy. But then, when I saw this table  at &tradition last week, I was strongly reminded of the garden tools that I knew as a kid. Weather warn darkened wood and robust steel at the intersections, something altogether more warm and homely that will age well. I’m convinced that this three legs at two ends table will be one of those seminal collectible design icons in the future, but who cares if it isn’t, it’s still a brilliant table.

Designed by British Harry Thaler and inspired by the Italian Bar Basso, an institution during the Milan furniture fair, Bar Alto was first presented at the London Design festival in 2011. The tabletop is made up of six boxes which are wonderfully expressed by a simple black around the  openings, the same like the table legs. I rather enjoy seeing a bar of this quality which is not fixzd to the ground.

If Santa needs to have a lunch break while flying around on his sleigh, “Dinner In The Sky” could be a likely pit stop.

The essence of a table is a place for an activity that is raised from the ground. The Dinners in the Sky takes this basic concept about 50 meters further, with their 7 tonnes worth of dinning tables that are winched into the sky by a crane. While up there  a meal is eaten by 22 seat-belted dinners and served by 5 harnessed staff. These staff have included some pretty big named chefs yet I don’t think that it’s three star cooking that the real  show stopper.

This whole table contraption is for rent or sale and seems to be popular as a high end corporate event. I do wonder if etiquette  allows them to remind the dinner guests to visit the bathroom first, as I’m sure any wind chill factor would make any call of nature more pressing. One thing that I am sure off, dropping your cutlery would be a major faux pas.

This is a second great design by Oscar Niemeyer 1985. It was an important year for him as it was when he returned to his native Brazil where he had built most of his iconic work. He had been in exile since the 1964 Brazilian military coup that installed a USA backed military government. An active communist (and future president of the Brazilian communist party), his work was always concerned with the egalitarian bringing together of people.

During this period he opened offices in Paris and designed the French Communist headquarters. This building ensemble is one of the most breathtaking architectural moments in Paris and it was here that his friends and colleagues gathered yesterday to mourn his passing.

When he returned to Brazil in 1985 it was by boat, as this great modernist master never flew. What more fitting way to celebrate a Brazilian communist’s homecoming than by designing a round table made from pau ferro wood, which is a fairly common native Brazilian wood that is very similar too, but less rare than rosewood. A Niemeyer utopian object.

Today Oscar Niemeyer has gone to redesign heaven, I believe he is upto the job. His large glass and steel cantilevered table Neimeyer, shows all the purity and monolithic lightness of Oscar Niemayer’s creations. Niemeyer, a Brazilian, was the great architect of Brazilia and, along with his contemporaries, the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi, and the Finish American Eero Saarinen, was one of the great poets of reinforced concrete.

One of the things that makes me most fond of this table is the fact that it was designed in 1985 the year that I left school. But like most of Niemeyer’s work it has that  sort of basic timeless modernism, that makes you wonder if he designed the egg.