Also this year, visitors ready to head off the beaten track of door-to-door events during the Furniture Fair, will find in Via Giusti a moment of detachment from the traditional Salone fare, a change of pace. Andrea Branzi's work meets the eye first, with his collection Transparency, made up of the bookcase Onda and the vases Iceberg and Ofelia, all made of perspex.

“In the overall context of my work and projects,” says Branzi, “plastic does not have an independent role. I have always used a variety of materials, following the multiple possibilities that they offer to represent ideas or images. I feel in line with the tradition of Italian design according to which technology is used for its aesthetic possibilities, and aesthetic thinking is applied for its technological consequences. Nowadays, plastic is connected to a broad spectrum of technologically highly evolved materials that give new expressive and creative opportunities. This is the aspect that interests me most in my explorations and projects, because it allows me to obtain types of colour and transparency that used to be impossible.”

In the next room, Giorgia Zanellato has installed an eight-piece collection of lamps called Mirage, based on the use of neon. Her experiments were motivated by her attraction to the variety of colours and diffuse gleam of this light source.

Marco Guazzini presents the results of his research on a new water-repellent material he has called Marwoolus. As the name suggests, it is a combination of marble dust and wool that at first glance might look like a typically veined marble. But it is warm to the touch, and the marbling is constituted by filaments of wool randomly running through the material, giving it a fluid pattern and making it dynamic and gentle on the eye. The tour of the Galleria ends on the second floor, where Andrea Anastasio is showing his Ri-frazioni project made up of objects, seats and vases distinguished by heterogeneous materials – shards of broken mirror; pieces of glass that are “sewn” and “woven” by ripped swathes of floral fabric; upholstered chairs; and “sewn” marble tables.