A table conceived as a hybrid of art, design, and architecture — the Ivo_03 pairs slumped glass with a base machined from a single five-ton block of Tula steel, a material not used in furniture since the court of Catherine the Great.
The Ivo_03 emerged from a commission by Meta, the contemporary design platform established in 2008 by Mallett, the venerable Bond Street antiques house founded in 1865. Meta’s founding premise was radical for a firm built on eighteenth-century connoisseurship: pair living designers with historical materials and craft techniques long considered extinct, and see what new hybrids might result. For Asymptote, this meant working with Tula steel — a darkened, inlaid alloy perfected by Russian armorers in the eighteenth century and largely absent from furniture production since the reign of Catherine the Great.
Material
The table’s base begins as a solid five-ton block of high-resistance steel, machined and shaped — not cast — into an undulating, topographic surface. The process demands extraordinary precision and countless working hours, producing an artifact whose structural integrity far surpasses anything achievable through conventional casting. Across this sculpted landscape, more than two thousand polyhedral, diamond-shaped facets have been etched into the steel using traditional Tula techniques, creating a surface that shifts between matte absorption and reflective brilliance as light moves across it. The effect is geological: the base reads less as manufactured furniture and more as a mineral formation subjected to millennia of erosion and crystallization.
Form
Resting on this terrain is a sheet of slumped glass — heated until gravity draws it into a gently curving topography that echoes and counterpoints the steel below. The glass is not constrained by a frame or edge detail; it simply settles, like water finding a basin. The dialogue between the two surfaces — one opaque, dark, and densely textured; the other transparent, luminous, and smooth — is the table’s central formal proposition. It is, as Rashid has described his work in this territory, a hybridized condition: a mutation between art, design, and architecture.
Context
The Ivo_03 takes its name from Hurricane Ivo, which was the subject of a warning issued on the September day in 2007 when the third and final prototype of the table was completed. It was first exhibited publicly in Atmospherics, a solo exhibition by Hani Rashid at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York in the summer of 2008, alongside a series of digital drawings called M-scapes and a group of gold boxes also commissioned by Meta. The table subsequently appeared at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2008, where it was shown as part of Meta’s inaugural presentation — a carefully staged dialogue between Asymptote’s contemporary pieces and rare historical works from Mallett’s collection. The Ivo_03 is in private collections and was produced strictly to order as a limited edition.
