You might call Paul Cocksedge a design magician. Frequently experimenting with the natural qualities of materials and light, he conceives light fixtures that double as optical illusions, sturdy tables that look as if they ought to fall over (but don’t), and passive smartphone speakers from repurposed vinyl records. For his latest trick, he created Freeze, a furniture collection made from mixed metals that doesn’t use a single weld, adhesive, or fastener. The secret to the line, now on view at the Friedman Benda gallery in New York, lies in the contraction and expansion of metal. “All of these metal pieces only exist because when you freeze metal, it shrinks by 0.002 of a millimeter,” says the London-based designer.

Freeze Bench.

His Freeze Round table is made with a hefty circular aluminum tabletop that has a hole in the middle and a precisely machined copper column base. The copper is frozen with liquid nitrogen and then threaded through the hole. As it expands while coming to room temperature, it locks the pieces together. The Freeze Multi-Circle table uses the same technique, but to embed hundreds of mirror-polished stainless-steel discs into a carbon-steel tabletop.

Freeze Table.

The process allows Cocksedge to make tables, benches, and chairs with extraordinarily simple forms, while marrying metals that normally don’t play well together. “If you gave copper and aluminum to a welder and asked him to join them, he’d say that’s not atomically possible, because these metals are not friends,” explains Cocksedge. “But this technique has allowed me to create furniture with nothing apart from those materials.”

Through December 23 at Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street, New York; friedmanbendaom.