2024.04
Between Giallo Fantastico and an Ibanez – custom made cement tiles
Materiality Matters
Milan, IT
"All the more 'grey-dressed', more 'darker', more distinguished people (those people I detest) always talk about 'tradition', always have 'tradition' in their mouths and ignore, poor thing, that tradition has always been the exception (i.e. the masterpiece that makes the rule), has always been health, strength, life, i.e. colour, and has never worn grey trousers, grey jackets, grey coats, all the things that make grey faces, grey spirits, grey lives. The true tradition, the one I adore, the one of which the innovators are the custodians, has always been colourful and sanguine."
- Gio Ponti
The clients' wishes were clear: they wanted a lively, colourful home. No carpets, but a living floor that could characterise the new spaces. A wandering between references and solutions: milanesity, materiality, unusualness, revisitation and colour colour colour colour.
The floor we chose for this house embodies both the colourful soul of its inhabitants and the typical Milanese boldness.
A floor created in close collaboration with Mosaic Factory (a company specialising in the handcrafted production of cementine, grit and zellige) that pays homage to the Milanese design history of the last century, beginning with the choice of cementine, a typical covering of Milanese houses in the early 1900s - which in its design recalls the more refined version of grit of the 1930s - arriving at the Albinian invention of the silipol for the Milan subway.
The colours, on the other hand, are a tribute to Gio Ponti's iridescent vision, echoing the colours chosen by the designer/ceramist for his "Giallo Fantastico" floor, which covered the large surfaces of the futuristic Pirellone.
A floor that is never the same, because it is the result of an artisanal process in which the skilled hand of the cement maker draws Pollok-like spots of colour and the skill of the installers compose on a grand scale an abstract design in which to lose oneself.
