Patricia Urquiola for Budri.

The mutability of marble. A natural yet “alchemic” material, formed and transformed, evolving through extremely slow genesis, taking on properties and characteristics typical of the environment where it originates, absorbing and representing individuality and uniqueness. Hard-wearing and stable, marble was historically associated with durability and prestige, becoming the favoured material for architecture and sculpture in the search for immortality.

Setsu & Shinobu Ito for Grassi Pietre.

Today, increasingly advanced technologies - including digital systems - are rediscovering its intimate, unsuspected and adaptable essence. Marble, inasmuch, is still changing. And this time is does so at a perceptive level, becoming ductile in order to welcome that flexible mirror of a world - design - experiencing continual evolution.

 Modules, accessories and surfaces are reviewed thanks to the sensitivity of designers in order to refine logics that are also increasingly attentive to sustainability topics. If, on the one hand,Patricia Urquiola (Budri): “We work with all waste and all marbles, mixing resins and wood I hope to work much more in this direction; we are approaching marble with great nonchalance”. marble is still able to impose its personality, demanding that we should approach its characteristics with deep and specific knowledge, on the other hand it propose infinite variables - of colour, consistency and impact - that make all kinds of other interpretations possible.

It is here that the fundamental potential for experimentation and innovation offered by design intervenes.This is the background to the challenge suggested this year by Marmomacc Meets Design for designers and companies. MUTABLE SPIRIT: become so flexible as to exalt marble as a mutating and mutable material. Make marble effectively "mutable" through their work.  

 Designers and companies 

 Marco Piva (Puglia Region): “Four very similar stones from Puglia ideal for being interpreted not only on the surface but also in their essence and profundity to highlight their visual, tactile and emotive aspects”.

Flavio Albanese for Margraf, Riccardo Blumer and Donata Tomasina for Trentino Pietra, Giuseppe Fallacara with Faculty of Architecture of Bari and University of Budapest for Reneszánsz Köfaragò, Raffaello Galiotto for Lithos Design, Setsu & Shinobu Ito for Grassi Pietre, Pietro Ferruccio Laviani for Citco, Michele De Lucchi, Angelo Micheli and Laura Cunico for Stone Italiana, Philippe Nigro for Testi Fratelli, Marco Piva for Regione Puglia (Petra Design, Pimar, Stonemotion, In.Spo Marmi), Snøhetta and Kjetil Thorsen for Pibamarmi, Patricia Urquiola for Budri.Riccardo Blumer (Trentino Pietra): “We must imagine stones as if the were vibrating, always in great movement. I enjoy narrating a material that is not static but dynamic. Marble moves, is always in movement”.

   Raffaello Galiotto (Lithos Design): “Stone from cladding skin to a solid construction element. Stone resting on stone to become load-bearing, an architectural element for separation and construction of living spaces”. 

 Photos: Alberto Parise