The fascination for us as designers lies in the objects’ grown and organic nature but also in its structured and mathematical quality. Both in terms of size and complexity Fractal Table pushes the manufacturing process to its limits.
The table is in permanent exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria&Albert Museum London and the Smithsonian Design Museum New York.
Fractal Table is produced by Materialise as a single piece SLA in epoxy resin. Treelike stems grow into smaller branches until they get very dense towards the top to form a quasi-surface. The structure starts quite unorganized at the bottom and gets progressively organized till it ends in a regular grid, thus a progression from an approximate fractal to a fractal with exact self similarity.
To achieve this result different CAD programs, both for nurbs and polygon modeling, were used. Fractal.MGX is the evolutionary next step of Fractal Table which was introduced to the public in Milan 2008. It takes functional needs, such as stability and usability, into account.
