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

It's almost as if you were imagining it as 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 plans. 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 its watermark. It's not just a table. It's a response to excess. A stripped-down, almost ascetic rigor, where every line has its purpose, every angle its measure. Not an ornament. Not a shortcut. And beneath this rejection of the superfluous, a magnetic density. What strikes you first is the apparent lightness. The round, smoked-glass tabletop seems suspended. Heavy, yes—but suspended. Nearly forty kilos, silently supported by a geometry reduced to its essentials: an axis, two intersecting planes, four outstretched arms. The secret lies there: in this masterful paradox between what weighs and what seems weightless. The glass floats, the metal fades away—and yet everything holds together. Only the pure, rigorous, and bare form remains. And this, too, is the success of this piece: this way of ordering without excluding, of structuring without constraining. Its design doesn't reject anything. It brings people 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. An entire spatiality is invented. The glass allows light to pass through, and the structure is there, whole, legible. And because it reveals, it makes visible what ordinarily disappears. The platform doesn't overwhelm; it exposes. The base doesn't just support, it composes. - Dimensions (cm): 71.5 (H) X 129 (W & D) Weight: 54.5 kg. Origin & Period: Roche Bobois (attributed), c. 1973/77 (technical documentation supporting this attribution available upon request) Condition: Very Good + (9.3/10).