22 Febbraio 2011
English
The contemporary lithic design
Continuity
Today, lithic design, facing great opportunities in a market that is complex and globalized, has returned to be the focus of reappraisal and of a deeper inquiry by the national stone&marble design industrial sector, and by the designer’s own experimentation in this area.
Design, seen as a market resource able to confer and impart added value to the raw lithic resource, has been the focus of the cultural event promoted by the “Ente Fiere of Verona” (Trade Fair Association) under the title “Marmomacc incontra il design” (“Marmomacc meets design”) for a few years. It is a team of designers who work with companies from the marble industries to elaborate and develop projects and prototypes to promote and advance the technological know-how of the companies involved. “The lightness of Marble; “Pelle, skin, texture”; “Hybrid and Flexible” were the themes of experimentation and study that were the subjects of attention in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
The projects promoted by the companies of the Consorzio Marmisti of Chiampo – such as “Palladio e il design Litico” (2008) and “I Marmi del Doge” (2009), conceived and realized by Raffaello Galiotto – , moved in the same direction.
Our reflection on the contemporary lithic design starts from our particular interest in the idea of exploring those elements that are perennial, eternal, permanent and that have never changed over the course of time, elements of continuity, together with those elements that are impermanent and thus discontinuous (or, at least, are divergent and in contrast) in the lithic design world between the recent past and today. If there is such a thing as the spirit of the times, what is today’s Zeitgeist in design? What is the governing principle during the process of artistic endeavour and of the production of lithic artefacts?
Among the atemporal and eternal elements (hence of continuity) between the past and the present generative processes, which give life to lithic design (or design in general), we believe the main inspiration cannot do without the essential research into forms, or in clearer terms, the need to confer form and shape to the raw material. “The fundamental idea – to quote Vilém Flusser- is this: the world of phenomena that we perceive with our senses is a formless and amorphous chaos behind which eternal forms hide, forms which we can perceive through the non-sensorial perspective of theory. This unshaped chaos of phenomena (“the material world”) is an illusion and the hidden forms behind it (“the formal world”) constitute the real, which can be discovered and revealed through theory. In this way, it is possible to know and to recognize how this amorphous world flows into the world of forms, which, itself, receives form before it dissolves again into the amorphous world. The material world is the filling substance of the forms”.(1) The immaterial (the form) in other words is what shapes and makes formless matter appear and materialize. If, then, form is the opposite of matter, design is the disposition and exclusive strategy of humanity by which forms are created for everything which is devoid of and without form (in our specific case, the lithic material – blocks, slabs etc. – ).
The world of the revealed, unveiled, replicated, varied, invented forms is at the origin of every activity aimed at producing design: natural and artificial forms, mutable and immutable forms, eternal and temporary at the same time.
This formal world, which lies behind the material world, represents the cultural stratum and heritage which every designer, (as in the past, as today) cannot escape from and renounce. This manifold, multiple universe of forms that seems to pertain to the “world of matter” is instead the fruit and result of the world of ideas, of theory, of culture intended as memory, of tradition, of knowledge or visionary imagination projected for the future.
The “I marmi del Doge” project leads off the discussion on the research into “forms”, by looking at the ideas which lie behind the architectonic style of the Ducal Palace of Venice. This is an architectonic style which is “against/contrary”, which would seem to be “built against the sacred laws of architectures” – as Wolfgan Wolters says in this publication, by quoting the documents and sources of the critics of the work by Filippo Calendario – with its linear tectonic loggias (light-looking, lean and screen-like) in the lower section, and the facing of the façade-lengths having a textile appearance (“heavy”, all-enveloping and cladding the Palace and very decorative) reaching out toward the sky.
From this “contrary” architectonically designed form, Raffaello Galiotto – with the method already experimented in the “Palladio and the Lithic design” project-selects, distils and extrapolates lines, figures and geometric configurations. He, then, transfers them onto the space of the digital project inspired by his creative alchemy, which by association and connection goes ahead with the fusion of the original forms and the newly created ones, which originate from the mysterious creative vision of the mind, thus bringing to life a new concept-project in lithic design.
Alchemical and magical processes are the source of creation, which the project “I Marmi del Doge” communicates to us through sketches, tracings and its lithic prototypes, which are the moulds of the mental forms (and digital, too, as we shall see later) of its designer/creator.
Discontinuity
The central decades of the second half of the twentieth century (we are referring, particularly, to the 60s, 70s and 80s) saw many “maestri” of the Italian design engaging with the creation of design and the putting into production – in collaboration with marble stone and furniture producers – of objects in lithic design style. Many of these products can still be found in the market: creations by Angelo Mangiarotti, Carlo Scarpa, Achille Castiglioni (…) and then later – during postmodernism – works by Aldo Rossi, Paolo Portoghesi, Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo Di Francia, Mario Bellini (…). Let us imagine these designers – many of whom world-wide famous architects – at work inside their crowded studios, studios fitted with drawing tables, absorbed with and concentrating on fixing lines, outlines, sketches, giving their collaborators the necessary information to transfer the idea onto a drafting board to have it executed according to old manual processes , and then starting the informal contacts with trusted production laboratories, capable of carrying out the execution and the manufacture of the pieces, manly by using, artisanal processes with little technology involved.
It is very different now: in the new millennium. The production of a new product from its initial design-project is radically different. First of all, we must signal the emergence of a new kind of specialist role. Next to the traditional figure of the architect-designer, we also have the designer-designer who has emerged over the years out of the project of the object, or in other words, people who work in the architecture of the small. This is something entirely new. The old general system of designing and developing a project has mutated, and now we find new protagonists involved; and this in conjunction with the generational change and the rise of new young talents (sometimes, extremely young) who have grown up in the digital-revolution-era and have changed the whole traditional way of working. The second element that is a break from the past – it is also very significant and important – has to do with the change of the physical space of work and the conceptual and operative change of the means of production for the realization of the design-project. The design studios have lost all the prestige and aura of authority. They have got rid of their large, crowding drawing tables, freed themselves of the universal drafting devices , emptied their studios of those casts executed by skilled artisans of that material. They have, instead, now, embraced orderly and aseptic computer consoles, equipped with large interactive screens that open up to the new world of virtual reality which hovers parallelly over material reality.
In the last 15 years, a sustained and fast process of innovation in the traditional concepts of space, time, matter, form and presence has been brought forward -as we know- by the progress in electronics, and this, in turn, has influenced the sector of the design in architecture and in the product (artefact). Computer science and technology, which have benefitted from the research done in the field of science today, have made available to design engineers powerful instruments of calculus and new innovative ways of creation, representation, simulation of the artefacts.
The possibility of applying differential calculus, equations, algorithms and functions – and to look at them as mathematical sculptures or even as “clouds of dots” in space – in virtual work-environments run by advanced software, has allowed design engineers to interact with interfaces of pre-figuration and modelling, through which they can experiment and create every kind of shape, through the simple act of formation (generation), de-formation and metamorphosis. What has come out of this, as a consequence, today, is a mutation in the space, in which, the new generations of designers practise their creativity.
The culture of the project concentrates on and feeds its creativity from atelier-laboratories – equipped with powerful computers, which are linked to one another in networks – aided by the skills of the new operators of computer technology, by experts in virtual modelling and in photo-realistic images who are able to work as a team in the development of projects, by now, totally digitalized: from the moment of the idea and design, up to the production of the artefacts. The computer is no longer a simple (ex post) instrument of work with respect to the phase of artistic creation. Through its programmes, the powerful capacity of calculus and of image-creation, it is today, a fundamental, element and a co-generating participant to the development of every idea and of every initial and preliminary sketch or outline of form.
The new world of computerized interface pre-figuration has, really, freed new energies and resources for a greater and freer experimentation in archetypes of forms (and their various possible mutations) where it is possible to view a design, or a form (or more forms, or more designs) from any angle or distance, in movement, or in reverse movement; visualizations of images changing in real-time. The same planning space, which gives rationalized space through the three Cartesian axes, evolves toward evermore complex geometrical matrixes and toward spaces having ever greater dimension. In these work-stations of multi-dimensional simulation, contemporary design is no longer produced in linear and sequential form (divided chronologically, from the designer’s initial concept, the executive project phase, and the making of the prototype). What is becoming more evident is the increase in the contextuality-complexity of the management of the project; the increase in the choices and of the data relevant to the different problem-areas and to the different phases of the process, last but not the least, the production process phase. The resource of computer-generated graphics open the project of design toward new horizons and territories.
The first of these new horizons lies within the digitalized development of the project itself, where the high level of technical graphics definition and the precision of virtual modelling which can be obtained in the form/shape of digital three-dimensional figures (either static or in motion-dynamic), is staggering. Amazing, too, is the high definition lines, curves, (shapes, volumes and sizes) the analytic data and quantity-information that these programmes can supply.
The second horizon, which is disclosed, pertains to the interconnection of operational contests that until recently had hardly even dialogued or been connected. Here, I am referring to the direct integration between the design-project to the production phase proper, which is reached thanks to the possibility of converting the data and of converting the three-dimensional images “the project file” into the language of commands of the machinery, which by now is completely robotized and run by software.
We believe that the context, for which the project “I Marmi del Doge” was born and developed, is not much different from what we have just discussed and outlined.
[photogallery]marmi_doge_album[/photogallery]
Towards computer-generated matter and materials
The spirit of times is also seen in the companies of the Marble & Stone sector, where, next to the old serial production lines, discoloured by time and by the heavy work on the hard and resistant stony material, we can see the presence of new robotized machinery of the latest state-of-the-art generation.
They are work-stations and areas capable of ensuring different manufacturing-processes run by the transmission (input) of electronic data which come directly from the digitally-designed-project phase. The chain, between the input signal of the data which transmits the design and the output which informs and commands the robotized factory machines on how to mould and shape the material, represents one of the most innovative features (and hence, an element of discontinuity) in today’s marble manufacturing panorama in contrast to the recent past.
These work-stations are numeral-controlled machines with movable arms guided by CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Designed – Computer Aided Manufacturing) software capable of shaping and modelling all kinds of three-dimensional designs on the marble or stony material through the aid of laser scanners and other advanced technological devices integrated to the machines themselves. By selecting automatically the specific diamond-bladed tools, these robotized machines can execute milling, facing, stripping on any three-dimensional monolith, and other types of operations, such as drilling, carving and cutting deeply into the lithic material. The small work space is significant (600 cms in diameter, 300 cms in height). This does not limit any longer the size of the artefacts, which can be put through the manufacturing process. The turning-point of these big robots – many of which are jewels in the crown of the yet unsurpassed Italian dominance and know-how of the manufacture of manufacturing machines – is in the technology (advanced software, sensors, lasers) that transforms them into “intelligent machines” with servo-mechanical powered arms in a multidimensional work-space.
What, in the past, until not too long ago, was only possible to obtain through many discontinuous and disconnected procedures, expensive, hybrid (requiring both manual labour and mechanized procedures/phases) coordinated and managed by the skills and experience of expert craftsmen, today, this is entrusted to the link between the electronic data flux of the digitalized project and the modelling force of the automatic arms which shape and carve the marble & stone material with high precision. In fact, the capabilities of these new software technologies have led to a new form of prototyping called digital prototyping. In contrast to physical prototypes, which entail manufacturing time and material costs, digital prototypes allow for design verification and testing on screen, speeding time-to-market and decreasing costs. This latest technology ensures, too, that the production process is continuous and flexible, so as to allow for the realization of either single or multiple artefacts, depending on the demand of the market. To give and to confer form to lithic material through a virtual parallel reality (generated by the design-project process) allows one to break into new areas and complex morphologies in the contemporary world of marble artefacts/creations, thus connecting today’s marble manufacturing sector to the prestigious artisanal tradition which has always distinguished Italian design and style in Architecture and in marmoreal furniture. These elements can be traced back to the typical historical contribution to the urban-life civilization our historical cities have made, of which the beautiful Ducal Palace is a wonderful testament.
Without this revolution in the means of production and without the digitalized design-project which make this all possible (and which, in the end, models the material), projects, such as that of the “I Marmi del Doge” would never have been possible in such a short time and with this high degree of experimental sophistication. The project is created and co-ordinated by Raffaello Galiotto, who is a typical representative and an emerging protagonist within this new panorama of the designer-designer, of which we have just discussed. It is a project of concept-design of the new millennium, before it is the putting in production of single objects in lithic design. The last thoughts we would like to make concerning the project “I Marmi del Doge” have to do with the synergetic relationship between the design-project and the know how of a company, and how this synergy can give a competitive edge to companies in today’s post-Ford economy. The evolution of economic transactions from a local-market context to a global one, does not only signify the Geographic dilatation and fragmentation of the market and the (exponential) growth of potential buyers-consumers of mass goods and services. It is also an indicator of the growth in the market for the demand of high-quality goods, which are distinguished by and prized for their quality, uniqueness and durability and which can only be obtained by using the best materials and the best manufacturing skills.
I would like to appraise and evaluate the “I Marmi del Doge” project within this framework of economic competition. To see it in its entirety, from the time the product is formally imagined and conceived, to its production phase, until the important phase of communication and of its marketing. I see all of this as a very innovative idea, which with the aid of the “design-project” can promote and develop the artefacts and the advanced technological standard of the companies united in the association “Consorzio Marmisti Chiampo”. These companies, which are linked in a network, are trying to predict the new market trends in durable goods, – albeit in niche products – which the beautiful high-quality lithic products certainly are, even though, there is an erroneous tendency to consider them being only luxury goods.
Go to Consorzio Marmisti Chiampo
Go to I Marmi del Doge