Year_2025
Dimensions_360 x 120 cm x h. 75 cm
Material_Cedar wood
Client_Riva 1920
Service_Concept design
1. Designing a table, in a world overflowing with similar objects, raises the question of why one would actually start designing another table.
This project, questioning the meaning of the act of design, aims to express an anthropological instance. Given material and function, this project focuses on the Form in the purest monomateriality of solid cedar wood.
2. We spend most of our lives at tables inside buildings. We do everything there: pleasant things, boring things, irritating things. On the contrary, at tables outside we mainly do “festive” activities and enjoy convivial moments with our loved ones. These are tables that are anchored in our memory because they accompany joyful moments, perhaps destined to light up the darkest ones. They are tables anchored to specific places that, in the vortex of the world’s flows, become a safe haven for affection. They never physically move from where they are installed, definitively marking the places where they lie for decades.
3. I was pondering these questions when, caught unprepared by a violent rainstorm at the exit of the Matisse Museum in Nice, I took refuge in the adjacent Archaeological Museum, thus stumbling upon marvelous anchor stocks dating back to the Roman period. Never underestimate civic museums, the inspirations they generate are genuine because they derive from direct sources and not filtered by a mediated gaze.
Inside them, “true presences” are offered to our contemplation that lead straight back into the power of archetypes and the History of man.
The anchor stock, here is the founding figure I was looking for. In a world in which everything transmutes into an increasingly breathless temporariness, anchoring oneself is the last act of resistance.
This table takes root in places like an anchor, generating a new founding myth for our lives distracted and dragged adrift by a world that overwhelms us like a flood.
4. The “open arms” profile of the anchor stock is highly evocative, a perfect shape in itself, but the project does not translate it literally (risking to be kitsch) but transposes it into a figurative matrix that draws the short section of the table and benches, then extruded along the length, as if it were a bridge launched into space.
Transfigured in a composition process, the anchor stock remains as an enigmatic, unique and unmistakable sign, a face that is not meant to be forgotten.
Like an enormous magnet pointing upwards, the table attracts our gaze towards an object that aims to best represent the power of solid wood, the trademark and pride of a company like Riva 1920.
5. The same composition process involves both the table and the benches. After all, in a table intended for the outdoors, benches cannot but be inevitable handmaidens.
In addition to the basic figurative matrix, reworked for hierarchical reasons with greater volumetric emphasis in the table, the two pieces of furniture have many other elements in common.
From the development of the shape by longitudinal “extrusion”, to the transverse legs with a tubular core and a base in a steel plate set back, up to the central beam structure that emphasizes the tectonics of the elements.
By obsessively refining the “mother tongue” of solid wood, a theory of “negative joints” it is unravels on three different scales. From small to large gap of empty space that persist between the wooden elements, a poetics of the interlocking envelops our gaze in the fascination of an object made with impeccable craftsmanship.
The sculptural nature and massiveness of this project was also born to ensure resistance to the outdoor elements over time. If it is true that sculptures loves being outdoors, perhaps it will be the same for this table.
