Turning the Tables Exhibition @TESTBED1. Thirteen  New Tables Designed by Architects, 2011

Proposing the exhibition to TESTBED 1 evolved from one's architect's instinct to promote and reveal the architect as maker whilst retaining the yardstick of an exhibition that might give a genuine joy to the aficionados of design.Architects, unlike product designers or artists, still lack the system of networking via agents, galleries or others and their design stays in their private realm of development without reaching the public domain.

The curatorial concept

The aim of exposing a wide range of new tables from cutting edge innovative ideas through to customized solutions designed around specific architects' needs, has resulted in wide range of form as well as intentions.

It exhibits displays that are fast to re-assemble, or domestically suitable in an affordable context, through such varied approaches as the selection of a tree in the forest as the best tree of dinning or perforating steel sheet for best stress forces, vs. perforating steel for best laid table. 

The Tables

Paticipants

The laid table, Will Alsop

Mimosa, Jason Bruges Studio 

Drawing instruments, Nat Chard 

Phable, Cinimod

Social Embrace, Peter Cook and Yael Reisner 

stressDESK, Bernd Felsinger 

The indesructible, Pablo Gill and Jaime Bartolome

8x4=2, Barnaby Gunning

The tree of dining, Helen and Hard

Labour of wood, Sandra Knoebl and Rudolf Knoebl

Nurbster II, marcosandmarjan

The sleep of reason brings forth take-away,  Naja-deOstos

Stress out, sixteen* (makers)

Architects who often focus at architecture - as one of the most complex visual arts - collaborate with many disciplines, who are all involved in the long a process of its making, from generating the design to the built end product on site. Nevertheless, some of them take a delight in directly making the real thing, and tables seem a great example of a pleasurable (yet relatively short) task that architects can enjoy making: right up to the moment of having the prototype in hand.

An incredibly wide range of CNC cutting machines and 30 printers enables today's processes to be more affordable than even five years ago, cutting different materials, in almost no time, or laying others in tight layers. (Robots are now entering these processes, though not sufficiently cheaply as yet.) 

Against this background, projects lie mostly within the drawing stage of elaborating a sketch that captures an idea, where the articulation and perfection of its three dimensional drawing is a real artistic craft. During the last decade more architects can be the makers of 1:1 building's fragments or of objects; a revolutionary shift, turning them from the visionaries who often lead design processes through the crafts of others to become crafty makers, where his or her artistic craftsmanship is hidden in the drawing yet again, since the making is directly depending on the given drawing to the machine; surely a meaningful change of character. 

Exhibition View

There were thirteen different tables on show at TESTBED1,Battersea, (one ‘arrived’ as a set of posters) exhibited from 30^th November until 22^nd December 2011; six tables designed especially for the exhibition, other six were new tables, while eleven out of the thirteen were first time on show.

We were then invited to show it second time at Great Western Studios, West London. We lost Mimosa, by Jason Bruges Studio, and gained Water Table by Heng Zhi; a Chinese born designer who lives in Vienna. Her Water Table Object was just arriving to London from the First Design Week in Beijing.

Turning the Tables was exhibited at the atrium and gallery of Great Western Studios, from 19^th January until 18^th February 2012. 

All photographs were taken by Yael Reisner.