Glass is Back

#85 The company FontanaArte founded by Fontana and Ponti in 1932 returns to its glass-working origins but without abdicating the experimentation of recent years. #salone2015

After a few years spent experimenting with a variety of materials and a broad and mixed group of designers, FontanaArte – still under the artistic direction of Giorgio Biscaro – goes back to its roots and traditions by including four glass lamps, finely worked but with technology strictly at the core, among its many new designs.

The Bianca family of lamps by Matti Klenell has a blown-glass diffuser adorned with an orderly series of delicate, light grooves that, on the white glass, look like tiny prints recently left on fresh snow and feature a fabric-like texture, an effect achieved by pressing the still-warm glass on a worked surface.

Made out of pressed glass, the Nebra lamp by Sebastian Herkner takes its name from the Nebra Disk, a metal plate with gold applications dating from the Bronze Age. The new LED light sources allow thinner gauges, reducing the size of the lamp, and Nebra’s crushed spherical design increases the multiplication effect.

Giorgio Biscaro’s HollyG celebrates the art of glass-blowing but contains a major technological innovation. The study of parabolas and how they reflect light has made it possible to concentrate LED emissions – usually very broad – into a beam of light just a few degrees wide. The light is concentrated at the top, where a mobile disk-shaped element reflects it, projecting it towards the surface it rests on without revealing where it came from.  The form (inspired partly by Audrey Hepburn’s sophisticated elegance) is almost entirely dictated by its technology.

Inspired by the precious material cited in its name, Marcello Ziliani’s Ambra design plays with different thicknesses that highlight the contrast between glossy and satin-finish surfaces; on geometrics and volumes; on the changing intensity of the colour as the thickness varies; and on the reflections on its surfaces.

14–19 April 2015
FontanaArte
Salone del Mobile
Euroluce
Hall 9, stand A15-B12

Glass is Back

#85 The company FontanaArte founded by Fontana and Ponti in 1932 returns to its glass-working origins but without abdicating the experimentation of recent years. #salone2015

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