Roche Bobois - Round dining table in smoked glass and chrome-plated steel - c 1975

One should almost imagine it in the form of a diagram. A circle. A cross. An axis. Everything is there: the elementary vocabulary of a universal formal language. And yet, the object escapes the coldness of planes. It lives. It reflects. It absorbs. Everything speaks of tension. Tension of lines, of masses, of proportions. A contained tension, a very contemporary restraint—but imbued with profound reminiscences, as if something of early modernism persisted in the background. It is not just a table. It is a response to excess. A stripped-down, almost ascetic rigor, where each line has its reason, each angle its measure. Not an ornament. Not an easy option. And beneath this refusal of the superfluous, a magnetic density. What strikes one first is the apparent lightness. The top, a round of smoked glass, seems suspended. Heavy, yes—but suspended. Nearly forty kilos carried silently by a geometry reduced to the essentials: an axis, two crossed planes, four outstretched arms. The whole secret is there: in this mastered paradox between what weighs and what seems to weigh nothing. The glass floats, the metal fades away - and everything holds. Only the purity remains, rigorous and bare. And this, too, is the success of this piece: this way of ordering without excluding, of structuring without constraining. Its design rejects nothing. It brings together. Four or six people can gather there - in an open circle, without imposed hierarchy. Everything is momentum, transparency, openness. A base, a surface - and between the two, emptiness as a language. A whole spatiality is invented. The glass lets things pass, and the structure is there, whole, readable. And because it reveals, it allows us to see what usually disappears. The platform does not crush, it exposes. The base does not only support, it composes. -- Dimensions (cm): 71.5 (H) X 129 (W & D) Weight: 54.5 kg Origin & Period: Roche Bobois (attr.), c. 1973/77 (technical file supporting this attribution on request) Condition: TB + (9.3/10).