Zaha Hadid’s office is usually reputed for it’s expression of form, but it has always had a love affair with materials too. I can remember one evening about twenty years ago her partner Patrick Schumacher getting very excited about forming concrete to a sharp point. They knew that it would crumble in places, but there was a desire for the beauty revealed when pushing a material uncharacteristically to its limits, to an extreme, and how that would reveal its intrinsic nature. With this attitude how can one not create the sublime?

The liquid glacial tables are made of acrylic, which reminds me of of the use of resins in model making to represent liquids. The resin can be coloured and manipulated, then it hardens and sets rendering a very realistic effects. When I see this technique used for water in a student’s project, I am so seduced by the water that I need to remind myself to pay attention to the rest of the model.

This table appears to be a pool of water that drains down into columns of water that form the legs, then instantly freezing to ice that retains the movement of the water that can also been seen in it’s shadows. A simple crystal like material forming a sophisticated table ensembles of one or two three legged parts. I do sort of wonder about it’s stability around the single leg end, but then isn’t that where the beauty of it is, pushing the design to an extreme.

VIA

Maurizio Fardo has designed various solid aluminium tables. The round three legged table Iny is my favourite, the square table is called Karé and had rounded corners on the version that I saw, and square corners on the web-site. There are also oval and rectangular versions. The legs of all the models have a rectangular sectioned and a round sectioned versions. These designs seem quite flexible.
Aluminium gives much more sparkle than steel and walking around the table-top the brushed lines give a hypnotizing shimmer. The finishes have names like satinado and agua. Even the edges with their dotted effect have a particular sparkle, as if they were the cut off ends of shinny strings which make up the table-top.

 The mining of bauxite from which aluminium is extracted is polluting so consideration needs to be taken when it’s used. A permanent object is a far more appropriate usage for the light weight qualities aluminium than throw away packaging. I would prefer one of these tables as a heirloom piece than a life time of soda cans and kitchen foil.

It is not surprising that the Swiss designer, Max Bill, who wrote a book in 1949 called “Mathematical thinking in the art of our times”, (La Pensée mathématique dans l’art de notre temps), would design a three legged table like this. Triangulation and curved surfaces are a fundamental part of his style. The Dreirundtisch coffee table is made of wood with a linoleum table-top and is currently available at the brilliantly named  Kiss the Design gallery, in Lausanne. An amazing place for post war design.

Reputed to be the precursor of steel furniture design, Mathieu Matégot trained at the school of fine art and architecture in Budapest and moved to Paris as a set designer. He was soon working with fabric, designing dresses and tapestries. He learnt to work with steel in the French army during world war two, after which he became naturalised French.

His attention to texture, juxtaposition and style of detailing reminds me very much of fashion design. Leather edged sleeves are like the brass tipped feet, feather weight joints where one material rolls over the other, bright colours with articulately accessorised separates and most of all light ergonomic fun objects that are designed more for a person than for a room. But any room would be more than delighted to have this Kangourou table, a table within a table, which is now produced by the danish firm GUBI .

French designer Stéphane Choquet showed this ingenious table leg design at “maison et objet” in January. This industrial wood clamp can be fitted to any depth of table top allowing the user to produce their own table. The Louis XV shape pulls this table out of the workshop and cleverly places it in a multitude of settings where it’s cleverness and humour never mask it’s elegance.