Giacomo Moor: Palafitte

ProjectB presents Palafitte, the new limited edition furniture collection by the Italian designer Giacomo Moor at Collective Design fair in New York.

As in the previous collections Attraverso and Metropolis, produced for Post Design Memphis, Moor focuses on the intersections between design and architecture and the boundaries between big scale and small scale, between the object and its environment. This year, unlike before, he challenges his passion and ability to work with wood and apply them on a completely new material: layered bamboo.

Driven by the lightness and grace of the vertical stem of bamboo, he embraced the new media and reinterpreted it to create an artificial, inert material, more sturdy and more resistant. Worked on a lathe, layered bamboo is reduced to the thinnest. The swellings that seem to mimic the shape of natural bamboo are nothing but a functional reinforcement for the joints.

The materials used for this collection are layered bamboo, brass, and sanded glass. Except for the brass used to join the vertical sticks and to stabilise each object, which was chosen not only for its structural properties but also for its aesthetic beauty, both sanded glass and layered bamboo were chosen for their functional characteristics. Sanded glass dims the original transparency of glass and evokes the thing sheets of rice paper, whereas layered bamboo guarantees high strength and elasticity; furthermore, layered bamboo, made of forty sheets of bamboo fiber glued together, allows Giacomo Moor to work with the same technique he uses with wood without experiencing breaks.

The natural internodal regions of the stem is artificially recreated with the lathe and it hides a mechanism of junction that allows the meeting among these vertical elements, the glass flat surface and the volumes from the essential geometries. The collection comprises a wall-mounted desk, a low and a high console, a table and a coffee table, a screen and a night table.

Palafitte
Design: Giacomo Moor

May 13–17, 2015
ProjectB
Collective Design New York
Booth C05
Skylight Clarkson Square, New York