Concrete TV Stand by David Bard in Switzerland treats a media console as found object—a meteorite of expanded clay and cement that arrived from elsewhere.
The television stand occupies an awkward position in contemporary furniture design. Too utilitarian to warrant formal attention, too visible to ignore entirely, it tends toward either anonymous minimalism or aggressive concealment. The Swiss designer David Bard approached the typology from a different direction: what if the stand possessed more presence than the screen it supports?
The resulting object reads as geological specimen rather than manufactured product. A concrete base—cast with expanded clay beads that surface as polished craters across its form—provides the visual and gravitational anchor. The texture recalls pumice or volcanic rock, suggesting formation through heat and pressure rather than mold and pour. A slender metal frame rises from this mass, suspending the television like an artifact in a museum vitrine.
The asymmetry is deliberate and disquieting. The concrete volume refuses the bilateral symmetry that furniture conventions demand, its irregular profile creating different silhouettes from different angles. The piece appears to have been excavated rather than designed—discovered in some improbable quarry and transported, still bearing the evidence of its extraction.
Wood grain impressions on certain surfaces complicate the material narrative further. Concrete remembers its formwork; here, that memory reads as fossilized timber, organic matter somehow preserved within the mineral matrix. The effect layers natural and industrial processes into a single object that seems to contain geological time.
What Bard has produced is furniture that refuses its category. The television, when mounted, becomes almost secondary—a glowing rectangle floating above something far stranger and more permanent. In an era of disposable electronics, the stand proposes an alternative relationship to our devices: not as centerpieces but as temporary inhabitants of forms that will outlast them.
