…It would look like the Honeycomb Table Set by Danilo Calvache. All across the imagine-design-build spectrum, creative types and craftsmen are embracing the virtues of the honeycomb. Perhaps most familiar to our GenX and GenY readers as a delicious breakfast treat with a retro appeal and a curious knack for capturing and suspending little droplets of milk, the honeycomb is in fact a structural phenomena with broad appeal for designers of all stripes.

Honeycomb Table Set. Designed by Danilo Calvache.

Consider: we 3ringers have featured no less than six products over the past year either indebted to or inspired by the Honeycomb. Have a look at Bencore’s Composite Panels, Kartell’s Honeycomb Folding Chair, and Sing Homes Honeycomb Panels for some clues to the shape’s intrinsic advantages. And be on the look out this week for three more, as we feature Tómas Gabzdil Libertiny’s Honeycomb Vase, Kyoue’s Honeycomb Lamp, and Danilo Calvache’s Honeycomb Table Set. From his home base of San Juan de Pasto, Colombia, where-in addition to molding fresh minds as a Professor of Industrial Design at the Universidad de Nariño-Calvache imagines and creates products that fulfill his credo: “when man ceases to create, he ceases to live.”

Finding inspiration in the natural phenomena that is the geometry of bees, he produced his Honeycomb Table Set as an homage to the six-sided shape we know as the humble hexagon. The construction of the piece is refreshingly simple: Calvache simply fashioned a two-dimensional hexagon out of metal, then cloned it five times, joined all six sides, dusted it with a sunny shade of lemon yellow (or honeybee yellow if you prefer), and topped it with a hexagonal crown of frosted glass. The resulting piece makes terrific use of negative space. Just as in those secret recesses of a honeybee hive, the space captured by Calvache’s Table belies the shape: one wouldn’t imagine that such a spare structure could be so formidable. But such is the secret of the honeycomb-elegant construction, wise use of materials, and exceptional strength to mass ratio. Danilo Calvache’s take on the Honeycomb certainly exemplifies the intrinsic appeal of all six sides.

via Designspotter