Metal / Material Experimentation
2021-2025
Diego Guerra
2026
Bookshelf 01
A bookshelf made from a single sheet of 4mm mild steel — or equivalent gauge in other metals — cut by laser or by hand and shaped through roll bending and press braking. No welding, no sharp folds, no added material. The form holds itself through geometry rather than thickness.
The starting point was a simple question: what is the minimum process needed to give value to a piece of discarded sheet metal from industrial production? Offcuts and remnant plates are a constant byproduct of metal fabrication — dimensionally inconsistent, usually destined for recycling at best. The constraint here was to work within those dimensions and let the available material define the object, rather than the other way around. The project remains in experimentation and has not been produced.
Anti-Tweezers
Bar tools carry a lot of unnecessary ceremony. The Anti-Tweezers started from a simple irritation with that — with the way objects behind a bar are often designed more for the performance of professionalism than for what the hand actually needs to do.
A 28cm stainless steel form inspired by cooking chopsticks: precise enough for garnish and ice work, tactile enough to feel like an extension of the hand rather than a prop. The textured tip is functional, not decorative. The length improves reach and keeps the work clean. It doesn't try to reinvent anything — it just removes what wasn't necessary in the first place.
Drip Column
The Drip Column was made directly for Expectations 86'd, so it carries the same logic as the installation: removing the elements that distract from the actual experience of drinking.
A chromed steel cylinder that lifts the glass away from the bar counter and holds it vertically, isolated. A perforated tray catches residual liquid and drains it into an internal container, keeping the surface around it clean and visually quiet. One or two glasses, nothing else.
The displacement is small but it changes something. On a bar counter, a glass sits among everything — the noise, the branding, the transaction. Lifted and separated, it becomes an object you have to approach deliberately. The gesture of drinking slows down. The attention shifts, at least for a moment, toward the thing in the glass rather than everything surrounding it.
Glasses 123
A set of three glasses — tumbler, goblet, martini — each shaped without a self-supporting base. They cannot stand on their own. A dense metal toroid functions as both stabiliser and thermal mass, receiving the glass and maintaining its temperature through direct contact.
Instability as the starting constraint. The dependency between glass and base is the whole logic of the object — neither works without the other.
