The story of Tubes is a family story that began 25 years ago in the countryside of the Veneto region, between the provinces of Padua, Treviso and Venice. Three siblings saved their carpenter father’s legacy of craftsmanship by opening a plumbing and installation company and decided, when the second generation came around, to evolve and independently manufacture their own radiators: it was 1992 and Tubes was born, with the first collection of Basic tubular radiators.  

In order to tell this story with a video, Gianluca Vassallo used the metaphor of the circle, sensing a similarity in the way the family members relate to one another and the product they imagined: a radiator that makes the circularity of water its focus as it operates.

“If the first stage was to give aesthetic value to a traditional tubular radiator,” Cristiano Crosetta, CEO of Tubes, states – “the second stage – the more important one – introduced a new way of conceiving radiators no longer as a technical object but as an architectural element”. In 2002, Tubes began collaborating with Ludovica and Roberto Palomba in view of finding a different way to interpret domestic radiators. The revolutionary idea was to detach the technical control from the radiator itself. “There’s no need for the valve to be attached to the radiator,” Crosetta explains, “thanks to our 35-year experience in installation, we fine-tuned a valve that, by remote control, can connect to the heating unit itself”. Freed from all technical elements, these radiators became, for the first time, objects that could express themselves like actual sculptures, on walls or freestanding at the centre of rooms. Square by Ludovica + Roberto Palomba or Add-on by Satyendra Pakhalé are products that cannot be identified as traditional radiators.

Since 2014 the company has been exploring a segment of the waterless heating sector, and has chosen to invest in moveable electric heaters, interpreted in a superb way with Scaletta by Elisa Giovannoni and Origami by Alberto Meda.  

Vassallo is credited with having told this story in a poetic manner, expressing, through the circle metaphor, a powerful content. “When I enter a production centre,” as the artist describes his work, “I search for the hidden mechanisms in order to understand the relationship between the owners and the workers, and the quality of these relations. For me, when there are production dimensions that have instinctive cultural integrity, it’s always right to convey this, because it’s smart to place beauty with beauty.”

A relational artist by vocation, over the past years Gianluca Vassallo has embraced as a videomaker corporate communications from a unique perspective. As in the video “The Circle. A Family Story”, made for Tubes Radiatori.