Shelving unit & bar table “River”
- materials
- Plywood, veneer
- year
- 2022
- exhibition
- “Habitat” at MOMA, 2022
- awards
- Finalist, ‘Invented in Russia’, 2022
- authors
- Anton Nadtochy, Vera Butko, Sergey Nadtochy, Alisa Silantieva
- production
- Studiola Furniture Workshop
We believe that the challenge of sustainability can be addressed, and people’s lives improved, by adding artistic value to spaces and objects.
River develops this theme through the reuse of an idea and through sustainability understood as the stable state of an object. Its form is based on the landscape pattern of one of our projects, Green River Park in Lefortovo, which was itself inspired by the network of fluid lines found in river deltas. This pattern was lifted from the horizontal plane into the vertical, forming the four-layer structure of the table leg. The bend of each plywood layer, fixed by several tabletops, provides rigidity and distributes vertical load effectively. Three legs arranged as a three-pointed star create the minimum structural condition for stability.
The table itself is conceived as a module for creating more complex functional structures. Two modules placed one above the other form a shelving unit; several shelving units placed in a row create a partition; a larger number of modules can form any configuration according to a fractal principle.
Plywood was chosen as the material because it is accessible and environmentally responsible, and can be obtained almost anywhere in the world. CNC milling was selected as the most precise and widely available fabrication method in workshops.
The object can be delivered as a finished piece or sent to the buyer as a CAD drawing for independent fabrication and assembly, which requires no additional tools. By optimising logistics, the object’s carbon footprint is reduced.
