UC87
rotten 18th century beam heads + glass fiber lamination
150x60x40 CM
Year built
2024
Function
Aux Table
Status
Available
If you look at a photo of the finished piece, you might think: a refined table with a reticular top and a concave organic form — the work of a fertile imagination.
But if you were shown the raw material and the designer's sketch first, you would probably start to suspect the design was shaped by specific constraints. This is what Iñigo Calleja calls designing in reverse — and UC87 is one of its clearest examples.
We had been sparing the heads of the ancient beams we use to make some of our creations — the ends embedded in stone walls for decades, blackened and softened by moisture and time through a natural process of decarbonisation — the waste of the waste. You might think this is eccentric, but Iñigo saw a glimmer of beauty in that peculiar mark left by time and thought: when we have enough, we'll come up with something.
Indeed we managed to gather about 60 of them after several months. The heads irregular in sections and lengths. Cutting them all to a uniform cross-section and arranging them in a grid brought a measure of symmetry and precision to all that irregularity.
Shaping the base into a concave form and raising it on four legs made use of the different lengths. Resin filling and fibreglass lamination gave structural consistency to a composition that had no conventional logic. A final coat of black oil to finish.
The remains of the remains, elevated. Irreproducible — because it could never have been designed this way had it not started from exactly this peculiar matter.
