coffee table

Slumping & casting & melting

Multi-process table exploring material integration

Material experimentation
Product design

Developed in collaboration with Luc Souchon, Koen Van Tuijl, Merlijn Depauw, and Make Eindhoven Lab. This table brought together four fabrication techniques in a single object: glass slumping, aluminium casting, foam sculpting, and concrete casting. Starting from hand-drawn sketches, the legs were sculpted in foam. Cardboard prototypes were then used to develop connectors, which became the moulds for the aluminium castings.To join the legs with the glass tabletop, custom steel forms were made to precisely match the aluminium connectors, allowing the glass to slump seamlessly into their shape. Bringing these four processes together required careful planning, constant testing, and a bit of praying.

A bit more of my process...

It all started with free hand drawings.

The handforms became 3D foam sculptures

We created a plaster mold from the foam sculptures. Later on the foam was melted with acetone and poured in concrete.

We created cardboard pieces as the connectores that will connect the concrete pieces and the glass. Through sand casting we used the cardboard pieces to create alluminium pieces. The texture you see in the pieces is due to layers of plaster we added to the cardboard pieces before hand, just for fun.

The aluminium connectors were first tested in the foam legs before casting them in concrete. Their top profile was then used to create custom steel cut-outs, shown in the middle image. These were placed beneath the glass during the slumping process, allowing the glass to soften and mould around their shape.
Finally, the concrete legs were removed from their plaster moulds and all the components were assembled into the finished table.