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Some weeks after the ending of 2008 Marmomacc here is the first of a series of reportages about the exhibition that took place in Verona.
After the presentation of the event, of the involved companies and of their collaborations
with highly acclaimed designers, it seems helpful to present a summary of “Marmomacc Meets Design” and of the “Best Communicator Award”, proposed this year as well after its successful first edition in 2007.
The fair, held in Verona between 2nd and 5th October, confirmed the success of the previous exhibition and proved the high professionalism and productive quality of the stone manufacturing companies. This quality is linked to the “culture of the product” and to a design project research that has had the possibility to express and improve in several new ways through successful collaborations between firms and designers since last year.
The 15 participant companies have been involved in the second edition of the “Best Communicator Award” designing and manufacturing their stands.
The two initiatives have confirmed as precious instruments of motivation to the development of a new kind of culture, both in the financial and productive world, that finds in the design of exhibition stands a preferred way to present the firm’s identity to the public. This medium, that of exhibition stands, takes part in the creative expressivity adding to a mere commercial instrument a new, rich communicative meaning.
The stand becomes a true temporary micro-architecture, which is able to show the art of creating high-quality products elaborating stone materials and in which each company invites and receives its public showing its identity through new products and project researches.
This renewed attention toward stand design seems somehow paradoxical within a fair that sees the stone manufacturing as its main protagonist. However, the apparent detachment of the stone from the stand temporary character becomes a challenge and, at the same time, a motivation for the experimentation of new working methods and conformations even going against the traditional conception of the stone materials as heavy and solid elements.
The marble is consequently proposed in previously unseen forms and manufactures linked to the suggested themes.
If in the first edition of “Marmomacc Meets Design” the main theme was the lightness of marble, this year companies and designers have faced the interpretation of stone potentials through the game of its surfaces.
“Pelle, Skin, Texture” was indeed the issue suggested in the 2008 edition: a theme with topical and up-to-date characteristics which gave the chance to transform stone materials into surprisingly metamorphic elements with conformations not typical of their nature and with metaphors of particular values in their surfaces.
Stone plates with manufactured surfaces, differently worked with the contribution of both mechanized production and handmade methods, let the visitors perceive their characteristics through touch and vision. This extremely tangible communicative approach allowed to give a surplus value to design, production and construction phases, through the interaction experienced by the public.
Visits into the stand allowed to fully appreciate and perceive the essential experience of it.

Surface texture of Pibamarmi’s stand for Marmomacc 2008

Professionalism and originality shown by winner companies in the first edition of the “Best Communicator Award” have been confirmed this years too, re-affirming as absolute protagonists.
A representational judging panel composed by Mauro Albano – Marmomacc Brand Manager, Aldo Bottoli – ADI (Industrial Design Association) representative, Oscar Colli – “Il Bagno Oggi e Domani” magazine, Vicenzo Pavan – Marmomacc cultural manager for Architecture and Livio Salvadori – “Casabella” magazine, awarded the prize ex aequo
to companies Pibamarmi from Veneto and Il Casone from Tuscany.
Winners last year as well together with Grassi Pietre, the two firms has renewed the guiding concepts of their stands thanks to the collaboration with important contemporary designers.
Il Casone, which won in 2007 collaborating with Kengo Kuma, presented to the public a project by architect Claudio Silvestrin based on metamorphosis of serena stone into orange peel, identified in the visit into the pavilion with a spiral development.
Pibamarmi, on its hand, renewed its stimulating relationship with Michele De Lucchi and Philippe Nigro started during last year edition. While in 2007 the stand was designed by Damiano Steccanella and contained objects conceived by De Lucchi, this year it’s the result of the collaboration between Steccanella himself and the two designers.

Pibamarmi’s stand for Marmomacc 2008, project by Michele De Lucchi, Philippe Nigro, Damiano Steccanella

Pibamarmi pavilion is presented as an harmonic architectural object with neutral colours and welcoming forms, offering a moment of relax and peaceful observation of a marble manufacture characterized by refined design, inviting the observer to stop by, come closer, touch surfaces, enter into the structure.
Externally, the enveloping structure seems like a homogeneous, neutral, vertically developed diaphragm. The architectural motif re-interprets a traditional “wooden palissade” that, coming closer to it, reveals its “petrified” essence linked to the perfectly manufactured marble. The close and tactile observation allows to comprehend the true materiality of the manufacture and its construction technique. The apparent superficial compactness is obtained with the juxtaposition of perforated boards, assembled in parallel on metal tracks to form two different surfaces – external and internal – that sign the spatial limits of the stand.
This intriguing and filtering envelop invites to get into the stand where elegant design elements projected by Hikaru Mori can be discovered, in perfect chromatic and formal harmony with the rest of the environment. The objects, alternated with relax zones furnished with minimal marble seats, delimitate the direction of the visit where the visitors can move in a slow but continuous flux.
Instinctively the sensation perceived is that of a pavilion composed by the compenetration of different identities but fused together in a unitary concept: from the exhibition stand to the bathroom, from the spa environment to the living room, to the meeting place.

Stand interior

Stone objects of rare elegance, manufactured with the forms of pure geometrical solids matched together in different shapes and colours, are caressed by the continuous flow of the water that, being the liquid and transparent element par excellence as well as a symbol of life, perfectly enters in symbiosis with the toughness and solidity of the stone.
A solidity that is confirmed and at the same time annulled by the ambivalent nature of the envelop, perfectly materic, graphic, chromatic and even metaphorical solution of surface-diaphragm, containing a collection of furnishing elements for bathrooms with a sophisticated taste of refined Oriental culture.

Elements of marble bath furnishing designed by Hiraku Mori per Pibamarmi

Pibamarmi managed this year too to create a perfect equilibrium between expositional products and exhibition project, renewing the esteem from the members of the judging panel who have once more recognized the quality of a company that decided to base its “productive project” on a continuous projective, cultural and technical research and that showed very talented in innovating and improving its suggestions through an endless temporal process projected into a more encouraging future.

by Sara Benzi

See also: A STONE “PALISSADE”

(Go to Piba Marmi)