Pibamarmi as the protagonist of 2008 Marmomacc
Marble "palissade" gets the first prize at the "Best Communicator Award"
Pibamarmi renews its stimulating relationship with Michele De Lucchi and Philippe Nigro started during last year Marmomacc 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 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.
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.
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