Tensegrity Table
text for the Salone Internazionale del Mobile
Sandro Aiello is a dutch poet and architect. Furniture design is not his regular practice, but if designing a building resembles writing a novel, then designing furniture resembles poetry. It sharpens the mind on very precise pieces.
Thinking about context and subject is often a starting point of writing or designing. Looking at a material, glass for instance, a whole set of rules can derive from its properties, to make a design particular. The idea of glass is not only its transparency, it is more the idea of almost not being visible but for its edges. Then, in case of the tensegrity table, the image of the steel frame doesn't stand by itself, but connects with the square form of the glass. Steel and glass include each other.
In former tensegrities, by Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Snelson and others, the attractiveness mostly comesfrom the the system itself, tubes hanging in wires and still standing up. Beautifull forms like globes or needle towers, but neglecting the problem of the connections. For the table, it was challenging to make a more aesthetic tensegrity. The joints, where the tensiles meet the trusts were minimalised. Then form meets form in a pure, mathematical way, leaving a cutting edge between the two. And at the point where the glass meets the steel, the trust bar is leaving place for the glass to be held.
Precision in design, buildings and words, it can emphasize the particular, things being itself.
dimensions
100 x 100 x 30cm
