 Paolo UlianLibreria Numerica
Vaso Vago
Libreria Primitiva
Autarchico - Dettaglio
Tavolo Without Waste
By Matilde Battistini
There is a phrase of André Gide's that really appeals to me:
"The sculptor does not attempt to translate his thoughts into marble.
He thinks directly as if it was all marble, he thinks in marble."
Just go to the website of Paolo Ulian to realize the immediacy with which this eternal child of Italian design uses thought as an extension of his hands and his hands as extensions of a cognitive process aimed at creating beautiful and functional objects and, most importantly, possessing an ethical and social value inseparable from them.
Traces, Respect the Material, Constructive Adroitness, Ethics, Add Functions, Good Form, Observe Behaviors are the key words that enable us to venture into his creative universe which is, first of all, design vision and a (political) view of the world.
True to the lessons of Enzo Mari, his teacher and mentor, Ulian conceives design as "a mission more than a profession, a chance to express sound principles rather than a mere financial opportunity for those who practice it."
Because of his personal vision of things, this means being sparing in the use of raw materials and energy, indicating a possible way forward with practical solutions and ideas.
Given these principles, his concern to avoid waste by recycling and retrieving is central to Ulian's poetic and his personal approach to a material such as marble, generally characterized by large amounts of waste in the manufacturing process.
A tireless experimenter, he affirms: "The best projects arise from experiments conducted directly on the material, by searching repeatedly in all possible directions. To be a designer you have to get your hands dirty."
We asked him a series of questions about marble and its use in design.
His replies are remarkably contemporary in their unmodish wisdom.
If you think of the word "marble", what associations come to mind?
I believe that marble by its nature has a sacred vocation.
It is the material itself that suggests this by its physicality.
A heavy physicality which paradoxically seems to want to express something incorporeal and impalpable.
Something that elicits the universal mystery.
It’s no coincidence that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey represents God as a stone monolith.
The ape-men instinctively worship the monolith because they perceive it as extremely important but wholly indecipherable.
The same instinctive reaction you get when you look at a block of marble, or even more at the white walls of a quarry.
Here the marble has not yet been altered by human hands but it already has a tremendous emotional power, which affects us directly, it moves us deeply.
Born and raised at Massa Carrara (where you still live), you’ve breathed the atmosphere of the quarries and the processes of extraction and working marble. How far has this closeness contributed to the way you work on waste and retrieved materials?
In childhood the most popular game among us kids was piastre, a kind of bowls played with small slabs of marble.
You won it by shattering your opponent’s slab.
So it was essential to get hold of the best pieces of marble to have a better chance to win, because certain types of marble stood up better to being hit and thrown than others.
I became knowledgeable in my small way about the qualities of various kinds of marbles simply by fooling around in my backyard and in the streets.
To get the best slabs we used to go to one of the many marble dumps nearby.
There we found enormous quantities of discarded semi-finished pieces eliminated from the workshops every day.
I think being raised in this area certainly fostered my sensitivity to the recovery of materials.
Then, in 1990, when I’d just graduated in industrial design, I began to visit a lot of craft workshops and marble dumps with the purpose of doing something of my own with the waste from all the different kinds of work.
I wanted to make a sort of collection in reverse, meaning one produced out of pieces salvaged from the dumps and characterized by a formal repetition to create continuity over time.
It entailed recognizing the potential in a semi-finished reject for its natural transformation into something else, without making too many changes and with only limited intervention.
What value do you place on marble and how do you approach it?
I have a reverential approach to marble, almost a sense of awe at all that this material has stood for in the history and culture of mankind.
It’s not the same with other natural materials such as wood or glass.
These are materials that can be recreated, but marble can’t.
Each block is unique, with its veins and stains and clouds, it’s always different, and the artifact that derives from it is unique.
We do not know how long we will be able to go on quarrying.
So marble is a very special material, which needs to be respected as we work it.
Which kind of marbles have you used in your work?
I don’t know exactly why, but instinctively I’m attracted to the types of marble that I know well, especially white Carrara marble.
Not the kind with a lighter-colored ground and more delicate veining, but the lower grades such as C and D, with the ground tending to gray, marked with stronger streaks of color, perhaps the less noble kind.
Probably it’s a bit like the way I see myself.
Do you have special techniques? And what marble-working tools do you use?
All the tools for working marble interest me, without exception.
From those with the highest technological content to the most basic, they all speak their own specific language, they have their own expression which I investigate to bring out the best in design.
CNC waterjet cutting technology appeals to me most because it allows for totally new approaches compared with the techniques used in the history of marble.
It still offers a lot of potential for experiments and discovery.
You’ve described your approach as "design as a function of waste." How do you apply this working method to the design of marble objects?
Everything grows out of the use of waterjet technology and observation of how manufacturing discards are often more interesting than the objects they come from.
So I thought I'd reverse the established path of design, where everything usually revolves around the piece to be created and so often there's not enough consideration given to the amount of waste this approach entails.
In my approach I've tried to eliminate the difference between "usable pieces" and "discards".
I try to give the same practical value to both.
An example that expresses this concept clearly is the Without waste table, designed for F65 at Marina di Carrara.
In this work a series of cuts made in a marble slab provided all the pieces needed for the three-dimensional foundations that support the glass top.
Then the skeleton of the hollowed slab, apart from representing the policy of using all the marble worked, becomes the natural base of the table.
Vaso vago clearly expresses your design concept based on the assumption that little or nothing should be wasted. Could you tell us about it?
For the "Cambiovaso" exhibition, conceived by Gumdesign for Up Group in 2008, I was planning to make a big vase but without producing large amounts of waste, as usually happens when vases are turned on a lathe.
So I started from the two-dimensionality of three slabs of marble measuring 60 x 60 x 2 centimeters.
I cut them out to produce a number of concentric rings of marble.
I then superimposed them so they overlapped to form a vase about 50 centimeters tall.
From a plate just 6 centimeters thick I got a vase ten times bigger using one-tenth of the material.
Could you describe the concept in Colonna potenziale?
It’s a project devised in partnership with Enzo Mari during the preparation of my solo exhibition titled "Between Play and Dump", held at the Milan Triennale last year.
We wanted to make a sort of monument to waste, so we thought of the pieces of semi-finished marble I’d collected some years before and that I still have in the studio, the curved slabs from the material used for facing semi-cylindrical columns.
We built a wooden frame and covered it with these slabs so as to create a portion of a Greek Doric column an emblem of the finest formal quality expressed by mankind.
This column displays the beauty that can be created by using the negative of the existing.
It shows that with the same amount of material used to make two hundred columns we could make four hundred.
And your latest work in marble?
For the 2011 Salone del Mobile in Milan I made five new projects for marble bookcases and tables.
The bookcases used marble tiles salvaged from the odd lots in warehouses, transformed by simple processes into elegant modular units.
In the tables I tried to develop my research into "designing with waste", where the decorative holes piercing the tops were "necessary" in order to extract the small round pieces stacked on top of each other that form the legs.
Do you feel that such a distinctive material as marble, symbolically and semantically, can suggest new directions in design and new meanings and functions in objects?
My friend Vinicio, a skilled craftsman, often reminds me: "You have to respect marble and it's essential to let yourself be guided by its limitations and its structural qualities. If you try to force it, or distort its properties, it rebels violently." Unknowingly he is saying the same things as Adolf Loos when he theorized about the informed use of materials.
And it is exactly so: the potential symbolic and functional qualities of marble are endless, but you should never deviate far from the path that each material clearly points out to us.
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