Brutalist Coffee Table

Williamstown, Massachusetts

This coffee table started with a ceiling. Specifically, the waffle slab ceiling of Hampshire Dining Hall at UMass Amherst — designed by Hugh Stubbins and Associates in the 1960s and still one of the most-used buildings on campus. The table was conceived, designed, and built during a graduate architecture studio taught by the principals of DesignLAB, where each student selected a Brutalist building on campus and translated its architecture into a piece of furniture.

The base is concrete, the top is glass, and the wood is sapele — stacked and chamfered in a way that echoes both the waffle slab pattern and the softened exterior edges of Hampshire's walls. That chamfer was important to me: it's what gives the building its humanized quality despite its mass, and I wanted the table to carry that same tension between monumentality and approachability. The waffle pattern does what it does in the building — creates shadow, depth, and a surface that changes depending on where the light is coming from.

It now lives in my parents' living room.

Pictured: Detail, Brutalist Coffee Table. Photo: Sam Batchelor.