The communal table

Package 02, sheet 1. The one object the café is built around.

A proposal, not a specification. Everything on this sheet is an idea put forward for the project architect to work from. Every dimension, every position and every detail may be changed. What must survive is the intent behind it — and where a figure is fixed by law or by the turning circle of a vehicle, the sheet says so.

Reference only — NOT the shape we are building. Sent by the client 1 September 2026. It shows the idea: a planted trough held inside the table itself, moss, gravel, one specimen tree. The shape is a free-form asymmetric kidney. Ours is not that.

Ours: a symmetrical oval

A ring in the shape of a nought — a 6.00 × 3.00 m oval with a 0.60 m eating surface all the way round and the garden held in the middle. It is symmetrical about both axes, so it has no head and no foot: nobody sits in the good seat and nobody sits in the bad one. It also holds the mist: an ultrasonic unit throws off a cold aerosol, and cold air is denser than the room around it, so the fog lies in the well instead of drifting off an open edge.

Numbers

Outer oval	6.00 × 3.00 m	Footprint 14.1 m².
Eating surface	0.60 m wide	7.4 m² of usable top. 0.60 m takes a plate, a cup and an elbow; less does not.
Planted well	4.80 × 1.80 m	6.8 m² of moss, gravel and one tree.
Seats	20	One every 0.70 m round a 14.5 m rim. All facing in, across the garden.
Floor it takes	8.0 × 5.0 m	40 m² with 1.00 m kept clear all round — a quarter of the 168 m² ground floor, for the thing people come to see.
Heights	+0.75 / +0.85	Eating surface at 0.75 m; the planter kerb stands 0.10 m proud of it so water can never run out onto the table.

How it is built

The slab under this table has to be designed for water from the very start. The well is a tanked trough falling to a drain, with the pump, the mist unit and the UV lamp beneath it, reached through a lift-out panel in the rim. Every one of those is cheap now and close to impossible once the floor is poured. Set out the drain, the water supply and a spare conduit before anything is cast.

The fog

Dry ice is out. The fog is made by an ultrasonic mist maker — a plate vibrating under shallow water, throwing off a cold white mist. No carbon dioxide, nothing to deliver, nothing to store. It runs all day off the same recirculating water as the waterfall, so the whole effect is one pump, one mist unit and a UV lamp.

Power	about 288 W	A twelve-head unit. Roughly 86 kWh a month if it runs ten hours a day.
Water	about 30 L a day	Topped up automatically from the same circuit; the level over the plate must stay constant or the unit stops misting.
Side effect	±0.9 kW	It puts about that much humidity into the café and takes about that much heat out of the air over the table. Tell whoever sizes the air conditioning.

Legionella is the thing to design against. An ultrasonic unit turns the reservoir into a breathable aerosol two metres from people eating. Four rules, all cheap now and awkward later: run the mist off the same recirculating circuit as the waterfall so the water never stands still; put a UV lamp in that circuit; make the reservoir drainable and reachable through the lift-out panel so it can be emptied and scrubbed every week; and feed it with softened or RO water, or mineral scale will settle a white crust over the moss and the table within a month.

And because there will be damp around the table, specify a honed or textured top — never a polished one.