Using Innovative Materials to Achieve a Cantilevered Dining Table

Year: Spring of 2016

Project: Inuit Dining Table

Material: UHP concrete and Douglas fir

Ultra-high-performance concrete is not a product you buy off the shelf. The mix is formulated from scratch — cement, silica, fine aggregate, polymer additives, and fibre reinforcement in ratios specific to the piece being cast. The formula changes depending on the required thickness, the complexity of the mold, and what the geometry is being asked to do structurally.

With cantilevered forms, the material is doing two things at once: it is the structure and the finish. There is no hidden armature carrying the load. The concrete itself spans, and the mix has to be engineered to handle the tension and shear that cantilever creates — which is precisely where UHP concrete earns its place. The polymer and fibre content give it a tensile capacity that standard concrete cannot approach, making forms possible that would otherwise crack under their own weight.

The design exploits this. Mass is positioned deliberately — the weight of the overhanging section becomes a counterforce, the geometry balanced so the piece is stable without any additional support. It is the same logic as a cantilever in architecture, resolved at furniture scale.

Molds are built to capture the exact geometry of the design. Surface texture comes directly from the mold face. The raw de-molded surface has a depth and variation that no applied finish can replicate — voids, aggregate exposure, tonal shifts that are outcomes of the material and the process.

The finished piece reads as stone because it shares the same logic: compressed, mineral, permanent. Except it is spanning space in a way stone never could.