PSYCHOLOGIST’S DESK

All good architects have a chair or two in them, or so they say. And when you

consider that chairs were key to the classic ‘total’ designs of such masters as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, you can understand why. But for East London duo Nick

Callicott and Bob Sheil, the repertoire runs to tables too.

Trading under the ambitious flag of Sixteen Makers, Callicott and Sheil have produced quirky one-off commissions since their days at the Bartlett School of Architecture. This intriguing little number was designed for a psychologist, who came to them via their one-time tutor and collaborator Neil Spiller, of architectural firm Spiller Farmer.

Spiller came up with the idea for the glass-topped 2.5m by 800mm table, which is based on the corpus callosum, described by Spiller as ‘the tube that joins the two hemispheres of the brain together’. This contorted form has been recreated by Sixteen Makers in medium-density fibreboard, gilded with gold and silver leaf to form the base, and incorporates one element in orange Perspex. Mild steel completes the structure.

‘One of their fortes is that they can make metal sing,’ says Spiller of his protégés. By all accounts the client shares his view, but what, we wonder, do her patients think? It’s a real case of mind over matter.