Alyssa Sewell | Graduation Year: 2023 | Instructor Richard Thompson

A coffee table in its most straightforward sense is typically a long, low table that occupies the central focal point of a seating arrangement and facilitates the serving and drinking of coffee. These simple surfaces can facilitate a multitude of functions from entertaining to a game night, or even act as impromptu worksurface. Further, a coffee table and furniture more broadly, can also express an idea. Throughout history furniture has reflected and expressed the ideology and values of the era in which it was made.

For this project students selected a client who is a collector of designed objects from a specific design/ furniture movement and create a coffee table design that responds to forms, details, and qualities derived, updated, and/or interpreted from each movement. Each of the tables requested by our clients are an opportunity to create a functional art piece. Through the design of these tables, students investigated the historic design movement associated with each client, articulating the tangible qualities of objects that express aspects of the culture, technologies, ideologies and values of that time. This conceptual grounding provides the springboard from which they launched their design investigation.