| Nine are the designers for SMASH, most of which have no previous experience with projects in glass. Covo’s initiative for this “experiment” is guided by the expert eye of Emmanuel Babled, who is the art director of the collection. Covo has been making home accessories of high-level craftsmanship for years, ranging from japanese porcelain, to glass from Murano. With SMASH, Covo asserts its design orientation by trying to define a different, innovative approach to glass through a collection based on contemporary inspiration; a new way of blowing life into the tired out craft of muranese glass manufacturing. This is the reason why designers were chosen from other fields of interest, in order to impose new challenges upon this precious material, working from clean slate. The results are refreshing and often a playful and sensuous approach emerges in these objects. Sometimes, the most “industrial” of the designers were disconcerted by the “stubbornness” of the glass, experiencing its unpredictability. It is true that glass is a material that can be shaped, but only up to a certain point: the point where the laws of physics and thermodynamics come into play. Infinitesimal differences in the precarious balance of temperature and chemical composition upon which the modelling of glass is based, can cause sudden changes in the way it can be worked, thus reinterpreting the project. To speak with the words of one of the designers that partecipated in this project: “not the form is the goal, but the process that makes it”. |
