Cantilever Dining Table
Objects | Dining
Six feet of black marble coming straight out of the wall, its underside rising to a knife edge at the free end. No legs.
- Location
- Bombay
- Medium
- black marble with white veins
- Category
- Objects | Dining
- Year
- 2023
Cantilever Dining Table
Six feet of black marble coming straight out of the wall, with no legs. The top is a thin slab at dining height. Beneath it the stone is a wedge: at the wall the section is an inverted trapezoid with splayed sides and a narrow flat bottom, and from the wall the underside rises in one plane to meet the top at the free end, so the table ends in a knife edge. The wedge is the keel of the table; it is what makes the top a cantilever and not a shelf.
The marble is a black with white veins. The steel that carries the table is inside the wedge and inside the wall, and nothing of it shows, because the table is meant to be read as stone doing something stone cannot do. The splayed sides mean that a person seated at the long side has their knees under the top with the stone falling away from them, and that the underside is seen from every chair as a dark plane that gets thinner toward the window.
The knife edge at the free end; the table from the side.
A dining table in a small room takes up its floor twice, once with its top and once with its legs. This one takes the floor once, from above, and leaves the whole area under it clear, so chairs tuck back to the wall and the floor is cleaned in one pass. It was built in Bombay in 2023, for a room where the chairs were drawn to match it.
Set for four, from above.
The detail is the thin top. A cantilever this long wants a thick slab for the look of strength, and the table refuses it: the top stays at 20 mm and the depth goes into the wedge, where it is needed, so the edge the hand meets is thin and the weight is at the wall. The steel is not drawn; the stone is what is seen.
Six by three feet at 762 mm; 20 mm top, 343 wedge.
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