One bolt, then another. The assembly line speeds up, and within minutes unfolds one of the most iconic sequences of Modern Times. While Charlie Chaplin turned a mechanical task into a comic device, he nonetheless traced the contours of a world where production—fragmented, disassembled, and systematized—relies on mass manufacturing and assembly. The design of objects becomes the domain of the industrial designer: part engineer, part draughtsman. This turning point is something Maurice Marty, a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art, fully grasped when he met Roger Tallon. Through trains, subways, and motorcycles, Tallon embodied movement in form. Deeply curious and close to several artists of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Marty looked at the bolts assembled by Arman and chose instead to isolate them—to regard them aesthetically, for what they are.

As postwar industrial revival paved the way for a consumer society, Marty subverted its values. A small bolt, typically mass-produced, becomes—through enlargement—both sculpture and limited-edition coffee table. A piece of metal meant to disappear into the background now asserts itself through its reflective surface as the centerpiece of a room. Bobby Boulon, by personifying the bolt with a playful spirit, becomes more than a component: a guest of the social stage.

By the late 19th and into the 20th century, architects began embracing the structural elements of their buildings. This gave artists license to explore non-precious metals—steel, zinc, aluminum—discovering through new alloys and techniques their infinite aesthetic and sculptural potential. Stainless steel maintains its mirror-like quality over time, while aluminum’s lightness and flexibility allow the thinnest of lines to support functional forms. Maurice Marty’s SUMOarmchairs, with his signature humor, play with the imposing presence of the material while conversing with space and emptiness. Around the same time, Ron Arad gained recognition for his dynamic sketches and balance-focused seating designs. Marty’s conceptually quieter FLY ON THE WALL modular shelf is nonetheless a technical and minimalist feat: produced in just two editions, it can serve as a linear punctuation mark on the wall or transform into a perfect square—offering infinite variations between the two, adapting to the objects it holds or asserting its sculptural essence.

The love of assembly, construction, and play seems to have followed Maurice Marty throughout his career. A childlike spirit emerges in his Mecakit series from 1970—a furniture line that embraces the “assemble-it-yourself” concept through mechanical parts reminiscent of Meccano toys. For Marty, the object is a vessel of imagination—a pretext for a game, a story. This sense of wonder also surfaces in Yonel Lebovici’s SOUCOUPE lamp (1978), a cult object in which bolts reference a different temporality: science fiction. Here, light emerges from a spaceship, drawing on a pop iconography that taps into the unconscious. Always gleaming, the metal used by Lebovici forms both the craft’s body and its luminous beam, serving as base and projection alike. From the industrial age to space exploration, metal, with its remarkable ductility, gives shape to all imaginaries—and seeps into our everyday lives.