Between Lines

Our new collection of spectacles begins as a single flat sheet of titanium, 0.7mm thick. Drawn from the folded steel tables of Isamu Noguchi, it is a study in line, plane and material: two frames, Gentilly and Kagawa, cut by light, folded by hand and tumbled until no two are alike.

Each of Noguchi's tables began as a single flat sheet, cut, pierced and folded into form, then dipped in zinc, which crystallises unevenly as it cools. No two came out quite the same. 

The geometry was exact and the surface was not: a precise process, with a little chance at the end.

It is an unusual way to think about furniture, and a stranger one still to apply to spectacles. 

A table can afford to be a sculpture. A pair of glasses has to sit on a face, hold two lenses in plane, survive being folded into a pocket several times a day, and do all of it while weighing almost nothing.

Between Lines asks whether a pair might be made in the same spirit anyway.

It is, admittedly, exactly that. Where most metal frames are wire, drawn into a round section, bent and soldered, these begin as a flat net of beta titanium, cut by light and folded by hand.

A net is the shape a form takes when it is unfolded and laid flat: the pattern a cardboard box makes before it becomes a box. Everything about the finished frame has to be decided while it is still two-dimensional, because once a fold is made there is no adjusting it.

Each net is laser-cut from a sheet 0.7mm thick, about the thickness of a credit card. 

Six sections are then formed by hand, slotted together and soldered around a bridge set at right angles; the metal is treated, ion plated, and treated once more.

Wire would have been easier. Wire is forgiving. It can be eased, bent back, corrected at the bench. A folded plane cannot. The drawings went through more revisions than any frame we have made.

The alloy is Ti-15-3-3-3: roughly 76% titanium, with vanadium, chromium, tin and aluminium.
It is a beta titanium, a family of alloys that are springier than commercially pure titanium and will return to their shape rather than take a new one. 

That is what allows every part to be drawn so fine. 

A section this slender in a softer metal would simply stay wherever it was last bent.

Fineness is unforgiving in another way. At 0.7mm every edge is visible, every joint is on show, and the eye reads any deviation immediately. 

There is no bevel to hide a line in, no thickness to absorb a mistake. The tolerances are the design.

What you notice first, though, is none of this. It is the weight, or the absence of it.

Then, after months spent getting every detail exact, the frames are tumbled in a drum of metal fragments and knocked about until their edges soften.

There is something contrary about it: a year of work on tolerances, and then a deliberate surrender of the last of it. The drum does what it does. Some pairs come out quieter, some brighter, some with a mark in a place we could not have chosen.

As with Noguchi's zinc, the process can be guided but never dictated. 

Every pair leaves with marks of its own; no two finishes are the same. They are not flaws, but the record of how each was made.

They will go on recording. 

Titanium takes a patina slowly, from handling, from a desk, from the inside of a coat pocket. 

A pair worn for a year looks like a pair worn for a year, which seems to us the right outcome for an object you put on your face every morning.

Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904, to a Japanese poet and an American writer, and spent much of his childhood in Japan.

He went on to divide his working life between America, Europe and Japan, and between disciplines too: sculpture and gardens, furniture and lamps, stage sets for Martha Graham, and the folded steel tables we began with. 

Both frames take their names from places where he worked.

In 1927 a Guggenheim fellowship took him to Paris, where he became studio assistant to Constantin Brancusi, six months that taught him, by his own account, to look at material rather than at subject. 

That same year he set up a studio of his own in Gentilly, just south of the city, at the very start of his career.

Four decades later he found the studio of his later years in Mure, a village in Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, long known for its stonecutting. He had first come in search of stone for his garden at UNESCO in Paris, and returned to work with a young stonecutter, Masatoshi Izumi, beginning a collaboration that lasted twenty years.

For the last two decades of his life Noguchi spent around six months of every year there. The studio is now the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan, kept much as he left it.