LAUFEN has told its story at the FuoriSalone, Milan, through the eyes of the New York-based studio Snarkitecture: from the clay to the finished ceramic product, an installation reveals the key to LAUFEN’s success…
During the FuoriSalone 2019, Laufen has presented an installation by the visionary New York-based group Snarkitecture, a creative, original way of narrating the company, on the borderline between art and architecture.
The location is Teatro Arsenale, in a building that dates back to 1272, at Carrobbio, inside the 5Vie district in the historical centre of Milan, now an avant-garde hotbed of cultural initiatives.
“The term innovation has many meanings, and all of them become fundamental for us at Laufen,” said Alberto Magrans, Senior Managing Director, LAUFEN. “Beyond our extensive focus on a technological plane, we believe it is important to grow along a path of multi-level research, interaction with stimulating creative counterparts, cultural influence open to a wide spectrum of the world of design and the arts. Collaborating with eclectic personalities and visionary artists like Snarkitecture gives us an opportunity to look at our history, our experience in a new perspective, to live it through new codes of interpretation, with constant reference to our true identity.”
At the entrance to the large space set aside for MATERIALMESSAGE, visitors have been immersed in a sort of canyon, whose walls face off in a dialogue of vivid contrasts: to the left, a mountain composed of 198 tons of raw clay, the same material that is stocked every day in the company’s warehouses, to become the basis of all manufacturing and to te right, a monumental three-dimensional construction composed of 701 Laufen washstands in SaphirKeramik.
Walking through the ravine visitors were able to experience the extraordinary difference between the raw material, in an imposing grey mass, impressive in terms of weight and volume, and the finished industrial product, perfectly designed, always identical, bright white, ultra-light, with a very pure, smooth surface and amazingly limited thickness. To underline these contrasts, Snarkitecture designed a theatrical illuminated scenography with a dramatic passage leading to a secondary installation of two other important protagonists: a large vat of vibrant slip, a mixture of clay and water, representing the first passage of the process of ceramic workmanship, and a video projection that reproduces sequences, sounds and images of the manufacturing.
MATERIALMESSAGE portrays the intrinsic power of a simple material like clay, capable of giving form to excellence when crafted in an impeccable way. The connecting link is the winning formula of Laufen, which blends knowledge, experience, technological innovation, design and fine workmanship.
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Main image credit: Laufen
