VESSEL, 2025

Brooklyn, new York

Gabriela Mestriner

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Vessel approaches furniture as artifacts - human-made objects that embody ideas, behaviors, and culture; objects that tell a story and document a condition. Handcrafted as a one-of-one piece, it exists as evidence of process rather than commodity.

Critically framing the present moment, where artificial intelligence puts our relations into question, detaches us from the physical world and objects are often made for the market rather than for people, Vessel opens up space to hold what’s human: its knowledge, its hands, and its connections. Conceived as a coffee table, it invites books to remain open, their content visible, and its form shaped and reshaped by what one chooses to place within it.

Design here is not the end, but a medium: for individuals and matter to be expressed, for our internal spaces to become more personal, for our knowledge to remain human, and for users to become the active characters of this relation.

Vessel investigates the possibilities of thinking through the hands - of how much can emerge from few materials, few processes, and sustained manual work. Handcrafted in Brooklyn from only steel, cork, and glass, this approach reflects a Brazilian perspective on making, where awareness of resources and material intelligence shape both form and meaning.

Questioning the boundaries between craft and industry, two identical sheets of 11-gauge hot-rolled steel are manually bent through cold processes, mirroring industrial precision while holding the human poetics of imperfection. No heat used in the process and no permanent attachments or connections between its parts.

Assembled by stacking, the two bent metal sheets rest on two cork blocks precisely cut to match the unique angle of each bend. They hold two smaller angled cork blocks, which support a glass top. Each part finds its purpose in relation to the others, held together by weight, resistance, gravity, and balance.