Fractal.MGX table by Materialise.MGX
Have you visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts within last year, you might have seen Fractal.MGX table by Materialise.MGX. It was designed by WertelOberfell Platform in collaboration with Matthias Bär in 2008/2009 and it is really impressive.
The designers from WertelOberfell are strongly interested in new technologies and manufacturing processes. Their works combine the experiments with computer used as a source of inspiration for design with the logic and beauty of organic forms and the reality of product design. Fractal table is a living example of their fascinations.
Per definition a fractal is a fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity. Fractal table is a result of studies into fractal growth patterns that can be found in nature and which can be described with mathematical algorithms.
In the table treelike stems grow into smaller branches until they get very dense towards the top to form a quasi-surface. The structure starts quite unorganized at the bottom and gets progressively organized till it ends in a regular grid, thus a progression from an approximate fractal to a fractal with exact self similarity.
Both in terms of size and complexity Fractal table pushes the manufacturing process to its limits. It is produced by Materialise as a single piece SLA in epoxy resin and truly is a piece of art. This combination of nature, science and new technology gives wonderful result – timeless design.
