MAKE AND BREAK Side Table

MAKE AND BREAK Side Table is a minimalist side table designed by Antwerp based studio Dear Objects. The fracture line cuts through the surface like a lightning bolt frozen in time, its jagged trajectory revealing the hidden architecture of cement-bonded fiberboard. In this single mark, the entire philosophy of MAKE AND BREAK crystallizes – a series that transforms the act of separation into a moment of creation. Here, destruction becomes generative, echoing the radical architectural spirit of Ricardo Bofill’s Walden 7, the brutalist housing complex that rises like a geometric canyon from the Barcelona suburbs.

The side table before us carries the DNA of that 1975 masterpiece, where Bofill reimagined communal living through monolithic concrete forms that seemed carved from a single mountain. Just as Walden 7 challenged conventional notions of residential architecture through its modular repetition and fortress-like presence, this furniture series interrogates the boundary between making and unmaking, between wholeness and fragmentation.

The material itself – cement-bonded fiberboard – embodies this conceptual tension. Neither purely mineral like concrete nor organic like wood, it exists in a liminal state that defies easy categorization. When fractured, it refuses to behave according to familiar material logic. Wood splinters along its grain, concrete crumbles under stress, but this composite reveals something more complex: a fracture that speaks to internal structure rather than failure.

The process reads like a ritual of controlled violence. Layers accumulate through waterjet cutting, building density and mass until the form achieves its intended bulk. Then comes the breaking – not with machine precision but through human force, hands working against material resistance until the piece yields along its predetermined fault line. This moment of separation becomes the object’s signature, as distinctive as a fingerprint.

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