Silhouette Pedestal Drink Table
by Steve Caruso
There were no magazines. There was no space for magazines.
DALL-E is not capable of performing what a human mind understands as creativity. Asked politely, it can emulate any style, and reproduce any known concepts in image form; what it creates can look as real as a photo. It won’t stand up under closer inspection. Its AI-generated images are naive, reductive, and cartoonish, with the gloss of an Architectural Digest shoot. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing: It’s absolutely terrific at uncovering themes and generalizations within the four hundred million image-caption pairs that it was trained on. Like digital shadows cast on Plato’s cave wall, that reduction can reveal the essence of something. “Here’s the image of a modern doctor’s office waiting room,” it’ll say, along with a 1024-pixel square JPEG of an immaculate, bright space lined with Eero Saarinen-style armchairs, framed prints of typographical nonsense, a smiling receptionist standing next to an out-of-scale potted banana tree. Right in the center of the frame, bigger than anything else in the image: a huge coffee table strewn with newspapers and magazines.
The content of those magazines can reveal a lot about the ownership of the medical office supplying them. Dr. George, the small-town GP I brought my ear infections to, was stocked with archives of Scholastic. The dentist: Time and Newsweek. My therapist rents from a speaker nerd, complete with a stack of Stereophile next to his McIntosh amplifier. Dr. DALL-E presents this month’s Mørkƒ Imp∂π5c4mµ… Fascinating read, I’m sure.
The waiting room at One Medical mostly lives up to the computed ideal received from OpenAI. An immaculate, bright space lined with Eero Saarinen-style armchairs… Stop me if you’ve heard this before. “Take a seat, they’ll call you in a minute. There’s water and tea over there,” the receptionist said, gesturing to a cabinet topped with a huge glass jar with lemons floating in it. Water was just about the only thought in my mind on that eighty-degree day, so it was my first stop. I filled a glass and went to sit down.
There were no magazines. There was no space for magazines. Reader, believe me when I say I was stunned when I saw this thing. I’d later learn that it had a name, the Silhouette “pedestal drink table,” drafted in Brooklyn and constructed in India by West Elm.
Barely a table, it’s a coaster floating in space. Twenty-one inches high and seven inches in diameter, its job is to elevate a glass from the floor into arm’s reach. The pedestal begins at the top with a small disc of marble, sitting atop a curved brass form that quickly pinches into a waist and then gradually opens up to the ground, ending with the same diameter as its top. Made to look like it was turned on a lathe from a solid cylinder of brass, its body is a thin shell with a heavy block of slag in its base for stability.
“A small footprint means it fits compact spaces,” according to the product description. Rendered in luxurious materials, the thing refuses to call attention to itself in tiny urban apartments and hotel lobbies. As a decor item, it is barely perceivable — an invisible plant stand, or platform shoes for a lamp.
Its application as a piece of furniture shifts Silhouette to the realm of absurdity. Yes, there’s a reasonable, practical explanation for this object’s presence here: We’re all just looking at our phones. Be honest, when was the last time you flipped through Consumer Reports in a waiting room? There’s always something new on Threads, and if you’re not in the market for a compact sedan, that’s an easy choice. It’s another thing for the office to buy, another thing to recycle, no real loss. Its application in One Medical, in theory, makes perfect sense.
Did I mention that the place is enormous? There is room for a full-size bed in the space where two drink pedestals sit. It’s an aggressive suggestion — don’t even think about putting something here — but a concession to practicality required by their amenities (delicious lemon water). A class of objects exists to serve this function: simple, movable stools and tables are common. The typology holds affordances for movability and communicates its provisional use with lightweight materials and grabbable handles. The operators of this location have decided these are extraneous functions.
Amazon spent nearly four billion dollars in February 2023 to acquire One Medical’s administrative and managerial apparatus. The physical portion of One Medical is a group of seventy-two “physician-owned professional corporations” — franchises, essentially. The company describes itself as “just like a typical doctor’s office, but we make it faster, easier, and more enjoyable to get care.” A subway advertisement from 2016 calls it “The Doctor’s Office,” followed by an image of a row of hard plastic chairs, “Reinvented.” Underneath, a photo of an orange mid-century modern sofa. It’s fair to say that the brand proudly subverts expectations about what the medical experience should hold, interior design included.
As an Amazon holding, it joins “the everything store,” a cloud infrastructure platform, a video and music streaming service, a wiretapping voice assistant, bodegas staffed by Mechanical Turks, a motion-activated panopticon — and, of course, Whole Foods. All united by a guiding mission: customer satisfaction and efficiency. That the design of this space fails to afford periodical accumulation is no oversight. In this setting, Silhouette is an end table reduced to something less than its essence, to the infinitesimal point that it’s formed a singularity. It’s a pure expression of the old saw that “customers don’t buy a product, they buy a solution to their problem.” I am holding a glass of water. I am sitting in a chair. Moved laterally from my lap in a resting position, my hand is located about twenty-four inches from the floor. I open my palm, and the glass levitates in position like it would on the International Space Station. As an expression of personality, “not applicable” is as good an answer as any. A job is done to satisfaction, and taken no further.
This piece was written for the “Narrative Strategies for Objects” workshop instructed by Rob Walker during the 2024 D-Crit Summer Intensive Residency at the School of Visual Arts. The next Summer Intensive session will take place June 2–13, 2025. Apply for free by April 15th.
