In the 1990s, Italian firm Sawaya & Moroni produced a range of highly inventive silver tableware designed by leading international architects and designers. This tea and coffee service, with its fragmented crystalline structure, represents a contribution by architect Zaha Hadid. The puzzle-like service disassembles from a tower to a series of irregular rectangles, shardlike elements, and voids, which form the individual vessels in the set. When not in use, these lustrous components can be assembled into a single asymmetrical architectural monolith that cleverly disguises its functions.

Excerpt from

Bonnie Pitman, ed. Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 357.

• The previous owner of this tea set confessed she donated it to the DMA partially because it is entirely unusable; coffee drips down the sides when one attempts to pour from the coffeepot.