nuuun design review » Gulliver Table by Torafu Architects

Torafu Architects’ public space intervention Gulliver Table reflects upon the contemporary metropolis, relationships and community with its incredible size.

During the fall of 2011 Japanese firm Torafu Architects placed a huge table at one of the parks of midtown Tokyo, hereby immediately creating a public space at an otherwise almost empty place. The consequences of this, however, are far more interesting than the ones of ordinary public spaces.

The Gulliver Table, as name suggests, recalls the furniture seen in the voyage to Brobdingnag of Gulliver’s, however, magnifying in itself is and has been a self-sufficient artistic and design strategy, the consequence of which is always a sudden change of contexts, which in one place, turns balloon dogs to pieces of art, and in another, becomes a tool of grand design interventions.

Magnification for children is an everyday experience, from their viewpoint, most of the objects are too big to be used comfortably. At the same time, adults don’t have to face this problem through the days of the week: in the case of adults, merely big objects doesn’t evoke the same effect on them.

However, here the object in question is one of the most fundamental human objects ever created, the table, the size of which assigns the size of the children to adults. While children casually view the 50 meter long table as yet another new toy, adults may experience this relationship with a long forgotten child-like wonder.

Irrespectively of the different effects, the table serves as a common denominator for children and parents alike, strengthening the cohesion between them by its democratizing nature.

Beyond this, it’s an urban furniture in question, which has finally found the place suitable for it, the city: the table becomes a piece of urban furniture just the way as houses became skyscrapers during the times. The magnitude of huge buildings, including starchitecture,—which “fucks context” at the very best*—isn’t registered during the weekdays rushing to one’s workplace.

For it to become an inner experience, this huge table was needed to be created, which at last confronts man with his own physical smallness. With the dramatic grew of the ordinary object, man didn’t grew along. This could be a sobering experience for the residents of urban utopias, since it questions human and humane, and in the end—even though differently—it still democratizes.

Despite all of its implausible changes, this huge table still remained a table, retaining the behavioral and social norms and habits ordinarily associated with the notion of table. This results in it being a common denominator for and among people, such an object which turns into a place the minute people sit around it.

This table is a social space generating tool, which might become the center of public life, and not irrelevantly, a stage of confrontation with the community and—whether positive or negative—accounting. In this sense, it further democratizes, and beyond this, it becomes a piece of real urban space, a piece of real public space.