Marmomacc Meets Design 2011 “MUTABLE SPIRIT”

The mutability of marble.
A natural yet “alchemic” material, formed and transformed, evolving through extremely slow genesis, taking on properties and characteristics typical of the environment where it originates, absorbing and representing individuality and uniqueness.
Hard-wearing and stable, marble was historically associated with durability and prestige, becoming the favoured material for architecture and sculpture in the search for immortality.
Today, increasingly advanced technologies – including digital systems – are rediscovering its intimate, unsuspected and adaptable essence.
Marble, inasmuch, is still changing.

And this time is does so at a perceptive level, becoming ductile in order to welcome that flexible mirror of a world – design – experiencing continual evolution.
This is the background to the annual meeting at VeronaFiere with MMD during Marmomacc.
Modules, accessories and surfaces are reviewed thanks to the sensitivity of designers in order to refine logics that are also increasingly attentive to sustainability topics.
If, on the one hand, marble is still able to impose its personality, demanding that we should approach its characteristics with deep and specific knowledge, on the other hand it propose infinite variables – of colour, consistency and impact – that make all kinds of other interpretations possible.
It is here that the fundamental potential for experimentation and innovation offered by design intervenes.

This is the background to the challenge suggested this year by MMD for designers and companies. MUTABLE SPIRIT: become so flexible as to exalt marble as a mutating and mutable material. Make marble effectively “mutable” through their work.

Architects and companies:
Patricia Urquiola for Budri,
Pietro Ferruccio Laviani for Citco,
Setsu & Shinobu Ito for Grassi Pietre,
Raffaello Galiotto for Lithos Design,
Flavio Albanese for Margraf,
Snøhetta/Kjetil Thorsen for Pibamarmi,
Marco Piva for Regione Puglia,
Philippe Nigro for Testi Fratelli,
Giuseppe Fallacara with Faculty of Architecture of Bari and Faculty of Architecture of Budapest for Reneszánsz Köfaragó Zrt,
(to be confirmed) for Trentino Pietra.