Cafe Table at 30 Hudson Yards

In 2019 I (and a team of others) made a large table for a coffee kiosk in the giant stone-age style lobby of 30 Hudson Yards. The table is 20 feet long and irregular shaped: it looks like a bent and melting sail boat. Its top is made of black Corian and its body of stack-laminated solid black walnut. The table stands on three large casters that do not work because they are stuck at odd angles to one another. There was some argument among the architects that was resolved by having casters that do not work. The casters are set within three custom made bronze cowls that cost some $16,000 to have poured at a forge up in Boston. They are blackened and look as if they are made from molded plastic; the poured bronze, beautiful in its raw state, is now a pointless feature, an invisible detail. The table took me a month to assemble, stacking and gluing the CNC cut walnut parts about the plywood armature. I worked Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. I was paid $32 an hour. While building it I listened to Stephenson’s Seveneves, Cixin’s The three Body Problem and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.  Once the sections were built it was carved smooth by the CNC 5 axis router and then required another week of three others and I grinding, sanding and scraping to get the surface ready to receive finish. We delivered it to the lobby in three parts because it would not fit on the elevator. The table weighs 1800 pounds. The supreme ugliness of this table cannot be overstated. It is a superlative and deluxe ugliness, much like the rest of Hudson Yards. What the rich lack in aesthetic judgment, they make up for in spending power. The total cost of this table was $155,000 dollars.