Afra & Tobia Scarpa "L5" Center Table for Goppion, 1983

Design
1983

Manufacture
1980-1989

Location
Lonigo, IT

Afra & Tobia Scarpa "L5" Center Table for Goppion, Metal and Glass, Italy, 1983.

Designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for Goppion, this center table belongs to the Bisante series, in which the couple built a small vocabulary of tables and seating around a signature steel base worked with visible, almost unfinished joinery. The pedestal here takes the form of a single hexagonal tubular column in steel, its surface carrying a warm, bronze-toned patina left deliberately unresolved, rising from a circular disc foot to a smaller metal cap that meets the glass above it without disguising the connection between the two materials.
The round top is cut in glass with a generously beveled edge running the full perimeter, its faceted profile catching light in a way that offsets the density of the base below. This pairing of raw structural metal with a refined, almost jewel-cut glass surface is characteristic of the Bisante series and of the Scarpas' broader design language through the late 1970s and early 1980s, when they continued to treat furniture construction as something to expose rather than conceal. As a center table, the piece works equally well as a freestanding sculptural object or as the anchor of a seating group.