Cutline, produced by Smooth Plane and designed by Alessandro Busana Design Studio, reminds me of a story told by the late, great Richard Feynman in his iconic book.
While sitting in on a philosophy seminar discussing some philosopher or other and the concept of an ‘essential object’, he was asked if he believed an electron to be an ‘essential object’. He countered by asking if a brick was an ‘essential object’. And then he said something profound. He stated that we’ve never seen the inside of a brick. Once you break a brick, what was inside becomes outside. One can never truly glean the inside of brick. It’s always outside. Well, enough of me. The designer’s words tell the story of these quite intriguing pieces of furniture.
SMOOTH PLANE … is passion, SMOOTH PLANE is wood chips, SMOOTH PLANE is high quality craftsmanship, SMOOTH PLANE is real wood. A young brand, created to give wood a new identity in the home through objects characterized by a strong aesthetic personality, rich in new functional content, and always shaped by skilled hands of craftsmen giving real added value to each individual object. In nature, wood presents itself through a dress – the bark – which contains the true essence of the material. This is the simple but essential point from which the designer Alessandro Busana and his team started for developed the “CUTLINE” project, a line of furniture that defines a dynamism of a precise action, a radical cut, an explicit gesture made to reveal what lies beneath, what lies inside, a cut creating functionality in each object and, at the same time, giving rise to an aesthetic able to evoke emotion. The interior thus transpires outside, showing the true essence of the wood; a shift in perception of the matter that identifies the object as having a dual functional nature, avisible area and a hidden compartment allowing for differential storage of objects to display and those to conceal.”