A superellipse sits in the gap between a rectangle and an ellipse — take an ellipse's equation, raise the exponent above 2, and the curve flattens along the sides while the corners soften without sharpening. Mathematicians call the family Lamé curves. The proportion that made this one famous, 6 to 5 with an exponent of 2.5, got its own name.
In 1959, Stockholm ran a design competition for Sergels Torg, a new city square where two major roads needed to meet inside a rectangular grid. A roundabout wanted to be round. The grid wanted straight lines. Piet Hein — Danish mathematician, scientist, poet, and designer — won with the superellipse, and it got built. It's still there.
From a city square to a dinner table
By 1968, the same curve had become a table. Working with Bruno Mathsson, Hein's superellipse table went into production with Fritz Hansen and became one of the more recognisable pieces of Danish furniture design of the period. It didn't stop there. The shape shows up in sports arenas, dishware, and the Superegg, a solid of revolution from the same curve family. In Denmark the word "superellipse" is close to synonymous with that table alone. Hein is also known for the Soma cube and his Grooks, the short aphoristic poems still part of Danish popular culture.
What's consistent across all of it: the shape was never chosen for how it looked. It was chosen because it solved a real constraint better than the two obvious shapes on either side of it.
The ELLIPSE Mount
A mount base has one job: hold four interfaces in the smallest, lightest body possible, without weakening any of them. Most bases on the market solve this by accepting the weight — a solid block of aluminium with the interfaces drilled in, heavy and blocky, hardware nobody thinks about twice.
I didn't set out to use Piet Hein's shape. I set out to solve a weight and aesthetic problem with a product that's usually exactly that — heavy, blocky, no real visual attraction of its own. As much as I've built my own path in design, this time it was hard to stay away from a shape that's been present in my life for as long as I can remember. Piet Hein was my grandfather, and I grew up with his stories, his books, and his objects around me in Argentina.
The superellipse doesn't define ELLIPSE's outline — it defines what's missing from it. The body starts as a rectangular block sized to hold all four mounting interfaces at full strength, and the superellipse is what gets removed from the centre. Material comes out everywhere the load paths don't need it, which is the same logic Hein was working with in Stockholm: a shape that reads as continuous and fits a rectangular constraint, without wasting anything in the corners a true ellipse would have to work around.
The thumbscrew carries the same idea at a smaller scale. It's built from a central superegg — solid material — with six more supereggs subtracted from around it, shaping the grip into something ergonomic that echoes the base's own geometry rather than just bolting on a generic knob.
That's the actual engineering reason ELLIPSE weighs 176.7g — lighter than any comparable multi-interface base with a published weight. Not a tribute. A shape that happens to solve the same problem twice, once as a void and once as a grip.
ELLIPSE — the facts
A compact multi-mount base for digiplate systems, built in 6061-T6 aluminium, hard anodized and sandblasted. One 38mm body carries four mounting interfaces simultaneously — Arca Swiss dovetail, 3/8"-16, 1/4"-20, and a 5/8" baby pin. Dimensions 60 x 42 x 38mm. Weight 176.7g. Includes a removable stainless steel 3/8" anti-rotation stud and mounts to any digiplate via the included 3/8"-16 countersunk screw. BUY NOW--->
