Compact and round for board games and intimate conversations, this flexible table gracefully stretches to become a long dining or boardroom surface without adding pieces or moving parts. Paper set in resin creates a kind of lattice structure that enables Friction to adapt to different needs, stable in either extreme form or anywhere in between. Stretched to its limit, it is 12 feet long and can seat up to 8 people.

Designed by Heatherwick Studio, it aims to accommodate groups of different sizes using simpler means than conventional slot-panel shape-shifters. Over 50 slats were slotted into the framed, calibrated and aligned to allow the surface to expand and legs to move seamlessly as it does. Like a wooden picnic table, gaps form in between slats, but these are narrow enough not to be a bother for most applications.

The form may be new but the design draws on vintage techniques and technologies. “Its grain and texture are derived from the fibres of the paper and the alternating orientation of the layers,” explains Heatherwick. “The resulting surface has a rich tactile quality and a naturally mottled colour which ages gracefully over time.”

This approach reveals something about the construction to users as well. “At any point in between, the surface is opened to reveal the internal lattice feature and offer a larger table top. Whilst the table construction represents the utmost precision and engineering, the finishing process of the table is much like traditional, hand-crafted furniture.”

Located along a tectonic fault, the town of Hollister, California, acts like an earthquake in slow motion, its surfaces slipping past one another along a ragged line visible in everything from skewed traffic lines and split sidewalks to entirely torqued houses.

As Geoff Manaugh neatly summarizes on BldgBlog, “Hollister is an inhabitable catalog of misalignment and disorientation, bulging, bending, and blistering as it splits right down the middle.” Thanks to inexorable forces of geology at work far below, “The entire west half of Hollister is moving north along the Calaveras Fault, leaving its eastern streets behind.”

Instead of the sudden and devastating motion we normally associate with earthquakes, Hollister suffers the movements of rocks below at more geological than human speeds, its buildings and infrastructure ever-so-slowly twisted through the passage of time. At a rate of one inch per five years, the change is not noticeable on a daily basis, but dramatic over the decades.

There are elements of Alice’s Wonderland all over the urban landscape: “Curbs at nearly the exact same spot on opposite sides of the street are popped out of alignment. Houses too young to show this level of wear stand oddly warped, torqued out of synch with their own foundations, their once strong frames off-kilter. The double yellow lines guiding traffic down a busy street suddenly bulge northward—as if the printing crew came to work drunk that day—before snapping back to their proper place a few feet later.”

Manaugh also traveled to a nearby bridge in Parkfield where a road bridge spans the San Andreas Fault, its distortions the ultimate manifestation of fault creep as each anchored side moves in the opposite direction. Built straight across, curves are already visible as one sights along the structure.

His photos here and elsewhere capture many of the region’s “minor landmarks for the seismic tourist,” which, “for all their near-invisibility, visiting can still provide a mind-altering experience.” All images by Geoff Manaugh.