 Ludovica Palomba Roberto PalombaStone House
Stone House
By Decio.G.R. Carugati
"From our very first projects, we decided not to overload individual configurations with an excess of sign, believing that though the products would be easier to identify immediately they would inevitably be born dated."
Ludovica and Roberto Palomba's approach is explicatory of the fluidity of a gesture that does not add, but rather subtracts, does not impose, does not obscure the essential.
"We're inspired by water, which is not form but transparency. As the cause, not the effect, of sensations, water is behavior. Our design ethic draws on fluidity, being both aware we are more nomads than settled".
Zygmunt Bauman observes:
"The extraordinary mobility of fluids is what associates them with the idea of 'lightness'... These are the reasons for considering 'fluidity' or 'liquidity' as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity".
In May 2006, with Idee Stock House, the story of a year of design, a project presented in "The Design Annual" of Frankfurt, Ludovica and Roberto presented a collection of objects that, taken from the context of a harmonious composition in the home, embody the cross-disciplinary research aimed at moving beyond the constant themes pursued with relentless monotony in furniture.
While a year earlier, with Thermae, an installation created in collaboration with the magazine "Interni" at the Salon du Meuble in Paris, they extended the bathroom to the setting of a collective ritual.
"An architectural space where natural polished stones display the different minerals they are composed of, the different textures like organic, tactile bas-reliefs.
The naked body interacts with an ever-varying architectural surface.
The large pools of water in the middle are a metaphor of baptismal fonts for ritual ablutions.
Everything – forms, lighting, aromas – helps to satisfy not the inner self but the shared need for wellbeing, making the place a point of encounter, of spontaneous gathering, and the rediscovery of one's own and others' physicality.
The allusion is to the Roman baths, the Greek gymnasia, where the cause of the shared feelings was certainly water and its transparency.
"Architects and designers, Ludovica and Roberto founded the Studio Palomba Serafini Associati in 1994.
They are responsible for art direction at Elmar, Kos and Zucchetti.
They collaborate with outstanding design outfits in the international arena, such as: Antolini, Bisazza, Boffi, Brix, Cappellini, Dornbracht, Driade, Elmar, Exteta, Fiam, Flaminia, Foscarini, Kos, Laufen, Lancia, Lema, Moroso, Poltrona Frau, Rapsel, Salviati, Sawaya & Moroni, Schiffini, Technogym, Valli & Valli, Viccarbe, When Objects Work, Zanotta and Zucchetti.
Their projects, of both design and architecture, are based on the analysis of changes in behaviors, the result of a method that combines opposites: creativity and function, innovation and longevity, never indulging in gratuitous stylist features.
Ludovica and Roberto Palomba live and work in Milan.
"We first became interested in marble by trying to find a key to understanding the age-old values of the material, to discover how nature has worked in its veins through time.
We made vertical, horizontal, diagonal slices through slabs which we then positioned inside architectural works, taking care to showcase its presence, its great dignity and decorative potential.
If placed on the floor, spaced by a featureless board in resin, about 40-50 centimeters from the outer walls, excluding the slightest relationship with the walls, like carpets arranged for the occasion to give form and decorum to the rooms.
These marble rugs are therefore like large fields of marble framed."
In 2003 they developed the concept Stone House for "Living the Time" in Verona.
Its modes distinguish the ethical design of Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, the peculiar view of the necessary balance between continuity and innovation.
"We felt it was the right moment to recover qualities lost in these recent years of extremes, without giving up the reductive conceptual approach.
You just have to look at the uniqueness of the design that nature gives each slab of marble to understand what we mean".
The essential reference is to the design of the German pavilion by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.
Mies himself declared:
"We have to become masters of the energies released and arrange them in a new order, and precisely in an order that leaves space free for life to evolve".
Ludovica and Roberto continue: "Mies reinvented the sense of decoration.
No more frescoes, carved walls, bas-reliefs.
Only marble faces and decorates the spaces.
We have reprised that concept in the Stone House, placing slabs on the walls to distinguish and characterize the living quarters.
In the drawing room, for example, there is one marble wall with dark tones that reflect the matt white of the others, with the effect of doubling the space.
The same slab of marble, extending into the adjacent room, the kitchen, meets the edge of a glass wall and is reflected in its turn in it.
The mirror effect is always very intriguing.
Marble is a material that lends itself to interpretation.
It meets everyone’s needs.
It is always different, faceted, varied in its colors, which are purely natural.
It performs the task assigned to it without the need for further applications of color.
As for stone, its charm is also great.
Any solution except the use of stone would be unthinkable.
The hand of man has perhaps more scope than machinery in dressing the stone.
One day, in Sardinia, while walking on the sand, we were surprised to discover a spring of water, very simple, of incomparable beauty.
For Rapsel we decided to create a sink inspired by that form.
It has two bowls, one deeper than the other, set side by side and carved in Pietra Serena (a gray sandstone).
The form is soft, sensuous, resting lightly on the square wooden stand with perfect corners".
Ludovica and Roberto Palomba's approach does not indulge to excess in the sign, which is qualified in the fluidity of the conceptual gesture.
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