Albers-Inspired NESTING TABLES

A colorful array of Bauhaus utility

- Sarah Marriage

Like many design nerds, the first style of furniture I fell in love with back in architecture school was the work that came out of the Bauhaus, a German art school that ran from 1919 to 1933 and served as an incubator for artists and designers whose work would lead into the post-war mid-century modern movement. The Bauhaus style featured meticulously-designed, yet deceptively-simple geometry coupled with straightforward functionality. A great example of this is found in a set of nesting tables designed by Josef Albers in 1926. Each table featured a different-colored glass top, black aprons, and oak legs. In revisiting these tables nearly 100 years later, I wanted to challenge myself to execute Albers’ clean and precise geometry, while swapping in a few different techniques. Instead of glass, my variation utilizes plastic laminate to bring similarly bright colors to the surface. Dyed black beech inlay and edge banding wrap each tabletop in a cartoon-like outline. And while my beech leg assemblies are geometrically similar to Albers’ they employ exposed joinery where his do not. Small bolts attach the tabletops to threaded inserts in the leg assemblies, and like the original, all four tables nest neatly into one footprint, waiting to be deployed as needed. I hope you’ll give this project a try, or maybe develop your own variation on the theme!

Four tabletops, shrinking in one dimension