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SCI-Arc’s CHUB table

By Sam Lubell

It’s not often, if ever, that a boardroom table causes a sensation. But recently, architects Ramiro Diaz-Granados and Heather Flood created one of the most original pieces of furniture for the board of directors of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Their table, called CHUB, which stands for central hub, was created after the two SCI-Arc teachers won a faculty competition. They enlisted the help of several SCI-Arc students, who worked at the school’s downtown location over the course of a summer and fall seminar.

Photo courtesy SCI-Arc

SCI-Arc’s CHUB table

View images of the CHUB table by clicking here.

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Diaz-Granados and Flood, former SCI-Arc students themselves, say their students have endless descriptions for the unusual, lime-green, glass-topped table, which is located at the back of the SCI-Arc library. They have said it resembles a grapefruit, a flower, a pomegranate, a jellyfish, a vagina, a collection of toilets, bottle openers, even an elephant. But the driving force behind the design, say the architects, was the desire to foster egalitarianism between the board and the rest of the school. “We weren’t studying any particular form,” says Diaz-Granados. “We were more interested in organization. This table is meant to be used by everyone. The school isn’t there for the board. The board is there for the school.”

Another important purpose, explains SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss, who commissioned the project, was to encourage the school’s digitally minded students to build, rather than just imagine, designs. “We wanted to make this world more plausible,” says Moss. “We’ve always said that the teachers at SCI-Arc were busy building, so we wanted to show what the faculty was advocating. That it wasn’t just hot air.” Diaz-Granados adds, “The ability to generate seductive, powerful images is getting increasingly easy these days, but it only serves as a surrogate for rigorous architectural production.”

The 19-foot-diameter project, which can accommodate 25 people, is round, ensuring that there is no “head” of the table. It can be broken down into 11 smaller wheeled tables of three sizes (the humorous architects call the small tables chubbies, the medium-size tables chubbers, and the largest piece, Chubba the Hut) that can be rolled away and used for meetings, presentations, classes, studying, and even as food trays at exhibitions and events. The individual wedges have curving side profiles, reminiscent of a wind-eroded landscapes and intended to make each piece stand out on its own. To create the table, Diaz-Granados, Flood, and their student assistants imagined hundreds of possibilities on Maya and Rhino and fed the final information onto Surf Cam for direct CNC milling.

Each piece of the table is made of a staggered stack of plywood planks, held together with puzzle-piece joints. The top of each wood plank is stained lime green while its sides keep the natural hue of the wood, creating a rhythmic combination of colors. The pieces’ hollow interiors can be seen via their clear and slightly green-tinted glass tops, revealing the curved, offset, stepped-wood inside. The tops closer to the table center are slightly raised to facilitate display; the others are lower for comfortable sitting. The table’s core contains its “brain,” a central computer that can be accessed for presentations via several of the table pieces (two large monitors will soon be installed behind the table). PVC conduit and aluminum outlets project from the core to hold the pieces in place and provide power.

SCI-Arc is commissioning other faculty projects to encourage students to “explore the potential of making in the digital age,” as Flood puts it. These include a new café by Marcelo Spina (that project is about a third finished), and a new metallic shelf system by Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu [RECORD, October 2007, page 63], which is almost complete.

Since working on the table, the architects started their own firm, F-Lab (they’re still trying to figure out what the F stands for). Meanwhile, they’re hoping that someone else will want their own, alienlike table in the future.

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