Friction Table
Thomas Heatherwick
2012
From art to design, interiors to architecture, to the design of urban spaces. Born in 1970, with a studio in London, the English architect Thomas Heatherwick approaches the various scales of design in a versatile, unified, synergic way. With continuous exchanges between disciplines, a multifaceted sensibility fascinated by experimentation across the board, on materials and compositions, with a constant focus on problem solving. In the project Friction Table, a one-off produced by Marzorati Ronchetti, the theme of the table becomes an opportunity to combine a response to the need for an extensible table with the invention of a new typology that changes the figure with a simple movement, pushing the edge on one side.
The pressure shifts the sectors of the unitary form, which sliding over each other transform the initial circle into an ellipse with stepped edges. This could be the birth of a “new species” in the world of furnishings: the “mutant table.” But what seems substantial is the way of getting beyond the “simple” formal approach to the definition of the object, moving towards concrete experimentation in which different disciplinary sensibilities converge.
Materials
Aluminium
This could be the birth of a “new species” in the world of furnishings: the “mutant table.”