Cosmic

There are projects where the manufacturing process becomes the design.

I designed an extendable dining table for Scavolini, a leg-bridge extension system, four legs that slide outward to accommodate the extended top. The initial constraint was aluminium extrusion: lightweight, precise, able to conceal structural solutions within the profile itself. The extrusion die did the quiet work: grooves, internal walls, housings for the castors on the moving legs, all inside the profile, invisible to the user but essential to the function.

At that point I made a choice. Rather than taming the cross-section, making it neutral or generic, I decided to amplify it. If we’re using extrusion, let it show. Let the leg say so.

The cross-section became rhomboidal, aerodynamic, taut. Along the front edge I drew a narrow groove, as precise as only an extrusion can be. It’s not decoration: it’s the signature of the process.

The rhomboidal cross-section already held an image: that of a leaf, with its central vein and the form spreading symmetrically from a single axis. I chose to listen to it. The groove underlines the precision of the extrusion. And it echoes the central vein of a leaf, that axis from which the form extends. It’s not a metaphor applied afterwards. It’s the reason that groove is there.