From "invisible" to "shaped", how glass finds a "sense of existence" in furniture




Glass is invisible and colorless as air; Transparent and pure, ethereal.




From more than 3000 years ago, the European Phoenicians created glass by chance, and the visual experience it brought was loved by many people with its intangible beauty and ethereal visual experience. At that time, glass was a rare and precious material, and many people took aim at this industry and devoted themselves to the production of glass products and utensils. Many glass pots and cups with various shapes and exquisite postures are purchased and collected by nobles in the form of artworks, which is also the beginning of glass entering people's daily life,  Glass product    .


In 1688, a person named Naff invented the process of making large pieces of glass. Since then, glass has become a common object, becoming increasingly common in daily life. Nowadays, glass has been widely used in the manufacture of furnishings and crafts and in home space. Although most of them appear as practical materials in wall partitions and door frames, there are always some brands that want to present the style of glass in a more creative form. They break through traditional processes and transform intangible glass into "stylish" furniture by means of heat melting and gradual change.
 
 
 
 
 
Li Shizhen once wrote in "Compendium of Materia Medica", "Glass, originally made of Li, is also known as Li. It is as translucent as water, and as strong as jade, so it is named Shuiyu." In the furniture products of the Italian furniture brand Fiam Italia, glass has obtained a smooth interpretation like water.
 
 
 
The founder Vittorio Livit loved glass from an early age, and after completing his studies, he began to engage in glass production. In 1973, he founded Fiam Italia, which combines craftsmanship and machinery, combines tradition and innovation, craftsmanship and design, and strives to create many top art glass furniture with beautiful shapes and excellent quality.
 
 
 
 
 
Currently, Fiam Italia's products include tables and chairs, storage racks, coffee tables, table lamps, clothes racks, etc., with a wide coverage and a sophisticated approach. The main production material is glass, and excellent technologies such as melting and firing, water knife cutting, etc. are used. Making glass freely curved and shaped is Fiam Italia's greatest feature. It challenges the practicality of bearing weight and durability, while also taking into account design aesthetics to interpret and present.
 
 
 
 
 
The streamlined design weakens the hard texture of the glass, giving the product a feminine and delicate aesthetic feeling.
 
 
 
 
Among them, the armchair named Ghost has a strong artistic expression. It uses a water knife with three times the speed of sound to cut the entire glass. The original glass with a thickness of 12mm needs to be bent and formed by hand with a machine. The entire chair is fully integrated and formed without any holding interface. The extremely smooth lines are formed in one fell swoop, allowing the glass to exhibit such a casual and stretchy shape.
 
 
 
 
Vittorio Livit hopes to make glass into beautiful, transparent, and sturdy glass furniture, allowing the seemingly fragile beauty of glass to be perpetuated in another brand new way.
 
 
 
 
 
As early as 1291, the glass manufacturing technology in Italy has been very developed, so Italy has always been known as the "country of glass". There are numerous glass factories and small studios gathered locally, and there are many glass brands that have been around for decades or even centuries. GLAS ITALIA, a glass furniture brand founded by the Arosio family in 1970, is one of them.
 
 
 
 
Just listen to the name, you can feel the brand's dedication to glass. Over the past 50 years, Glas Italia has been focusing on the design and production of glass furniture, transforming itself from a family glass workshop into a well-known brand of glass furniture.
 
 
 
 
 
For this reason, the furniture products produced by Glas Italia are also becoming more and more extensive, including side tables, dining tables, mirrors, chairs, bookshelves, lockers, etc. At the same time, Glas Italia attaches great importance to cooperating with famous designers around the world, making the resulting home products more diverse and personalized, and in a benign state of continuous breakthroughs, injecting a continuous stream of creative vitality into Glas Italia.
 
 
 
 
Most particularly, Glas Italia's products have very distinctive visual characteristics. Generally speaking, the biggest characteristics of glass are transparency, intangibility, and fragility. This is also a difficult point in designing and manufacturing glass, and it is difficult to break through its own shape if not well mastered.
 
 
 
 
 
Due to the cooperation with different designers and under the fixed condition of "using glass", designers have developed their imaginative imagination, using different shapes of interwoven and overlapping color lines to re interpret the purity and transparency of glass. In addition to the extremely high glass production process of Glass Italia, the products produced have magnificent and varied colors and flowing and gradual textures, with different styles, Give glass a more flexible artistic temperament.
 
 
 
 
In addition to being a brand of glass furniture, Glas Italia is also like a gathering place for glass artists. They not only retain the characteristics of glass, but also establish the brand tone of Glas Italia with its simple design without any redundant decoration, making these furniture easily integrated into any environment.
 
 
 
 
The Italian brand Tonelli Design, which is also a leader in glass furniture, was founded in the 1980s. Unlike the two brands mentioned above, the product features of Tonelli Design are more rationalistic, except for the basic modeling rounded corners, where the design elements of curved glass are invisible.
 
 
 
 
Compared to using the strong plasticity of glass itself to shape, Tonelli Design introduced an Italian technology for welding straight glass, using structural adhesive to seamlessly connect glass to make furniture products. Not only does it retain the transparent properties of glass, but also greatly enhances its load-bearing and stability, making it possible to use as a substrate to support heavy objects.
 
 
 
 
 
Over the years, this technology has reached extremely high quality standards, providing a more perfect solution for glass furniture manufacturers and various glass products, and also allowing more possibilities for interpretation and expression of Tonelli Design's works. In addition to all glass spliced furniture, stitching with marble, leather, and other materials is also one of the highlights of Tonelli Design's design.
 
 
 
 
 
For example, the Naked transparent chair uses glass and leather stitching to make the entire body skeleton, with side openings forming comfortable armrests. Although it is made of tough glass, the leather cushion gives the seat a full sense of comfort. The extremely simple shape has the characteristics of Bauhaus design, perfectly highlighting the beauty of structural lines.
 
 
 
 
 
Tonelli Design not only allows us to see the various interpretations of glass in the field of furniture, but also its development philosophy is based on inheriting tradition and introducing the old to bring forth the new. By combining enthusiasm for glass materials, it promotes the development of glass culture.
 
 
 
 
Although Wonderglass was founded in London, England, its main business is glass lighting and installation products. The reason why the brand has chosen Murano Island, a famous glass center in Venice, Italy, as its product design and production base. In recent years, the brand has persisted in cooperating with well-known architects and artists, striving to bring indoor space into a surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, bringing people a world that can inspire infinite imagination.
 
 
 
 
 
At the 2019 Milan Furniture Exhibition, Wonderglass collaborated with the minimalist master Oki Sato and his Tokyo based studio Nendo to plan an exhibition called "Shape of Gravity", which showcased the "Melt" furniture series they collaborated with, refreshing people's understanding of the conceptual boundaries and performance of glass.
 
 
 
 
 
As the name implies, the entire series explores the plasticity of glass from melting to solidification. They hope to use gravity to create a natural curve through the period between melting and solidification of the glass.
 
 
 
 
 
According to the designer's description, the flexibility of glass after cooling is crucial, which determines the suspension form of the object. This requires a skilled craftsman to first pour molten glass into a square frame and spread it like a dough to form a uniform thickness, while smoothing the surface with an iron trowel. When the glass starts to cool and reach a certain degree of flexibility, carefully move it onto a U-shaped mold. The glass will slowly sink and stretch, eventually forming an arch shape.
 
 
 
 
 
Oki Sato is inspired by this process and named the series "Melt". In addition to the word book, its letter shape also has the characteristics of bending, stretching, and softness.
 
 
 
 
 
This series includes tables and chairs, lamps, side tables, etc., retaining the transparent feeling of the glass itself, and the curved shape resembles the natural and smooth flow of the entire series like flowing water freezing.
 
 
 
 
River Roshan is an experimental design studio dedicated to exploring innovative ways to use materials. Their strong interest in colors, textures, and materials has led to many creative products.
 
 
 
 
In their series of glass furniture, they explore the interaction between colored glass and light to create richer colors that give the furniture a unique gradient.
 
 
 
 
 
In addition, River Roshan is also good at writing on support points. They use glass balls of different sizes to replace traditional table leg shapes, making the entire furniture look more transparent. The added reflected light from these balls can also bring a richer visual impression.
 
 
 
 
Latvian designer Germans Erics has become one of the most anticipated cutting-edge designers in Europe due to its exquisite and fresh stained glass furniture. In 2014, Germans Erics founded his own studio in Amsterdam, and then began creating glass furniture.
 
 
 
 
 
In the eyes of Germans Ermics, glass is a material full of contradictions, both soft and plastic, but also hard and fragile. It can be pure and flawless, can also be colorful, and even can freely transform between transparent and opaque. This uncertainty and limitations fascinated Germans Ermics.
 
 
 
 
 
The process of constant experimentation and challenge has brought more new inspiration and possibilities to Germans Erics, as well as a strong creative desire, such as the different combinations of glass and light, or their application in space devices. In 2017, Germans Erics created the Ombr é Glass Chair gradient chair series in honor of the glass chair made by Japanese designer Kuramata Shiro in 1976, and applied his understanding of color to the presentation of the work.
 
 
 
 
Ombr é Glass Chair Gradient Chair with transparent glass texture (top)
 
 
 
 
It is said that Cangmata Sloan was inspired by the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" to design this glass chair without any screws, eliminating all traces of "structure". Therefore, Ombr é Glass Chair uses the revolutionary new industrial product Photobond 100 to bond the glass, making the chair look like it has no obvious support, hanging in the air, with gradient colors, and a strong futuristic style, It seems as if the next moment will be the beginning of a space tour.
 
 
 
 
Ombr é Glass Chair Gradient Chair Multi color gradient effect
 
 
 
 
The design company ThinkStudio based in Bangkok often comes up with a lot of interesting products and names that are quite interesting, such as "Made in Thailand" or "Made in Thailand".
 
 
 
 
 
In the "Made in Thailand" series of furniture, Think Studio has created a side table using corrugated glass. The colorful curved structure of the table consists of a layer of groove glass, a layer of flat glass, and a gradient printing tape sealed in the middle, creating a unique visual effect.
 
 
 
 
The two different color gradients fade from top to bottom, as if transparent colored materials gradually disappear from the top to the bottom of the table, bringing fresh and interesting visual experiences and activating the spatial atmosphere.
 
 
 
 
"I always feel a sense of tension in industrial materials, which makes me want to explore how to 'relax' materials and allow them to 'breathe'." British designer Paul Cocksedge perfectly interpreted this sentence in the furniture 'Slump' series exhibited last year, as if the glass countertop flowed and collapsed along with the base structure of the table.
 
 
 
 
The stone based table in the "Slump" series,
 
 
 
 
Before that, it was difficult to imagine how hard and translucent glass could be covered with stones, wooden stakes, and metals in a "semi dissolved" manner. Paul Cocksedge heated and softened the glass, exerting pressure on the finished product, truly giving the glass a rippling, lightweight, and floating texture.
 
 
 
 
The table in the "Slump" series is based on a tree stump,
 
 
 
 
"To some extent, it is against the laws of nature to reheat such glass."
 
 
 
 
 
"The design concept may seem simple, and the production process can sometimes be overwhelming, but it's also quite fascinating. Complex technological processes are the foundation for implementing ideas." Paul Cocksedge continued to elaborate on this concept of design transformation and technology upgrading.
 
 
 
 
A table in the "Slump" series with a metal tube as the base. Source: Paul Cocksedge Studio official website
 
 
 
 
That's why, at the pace of creativity and persistence, Paul Cocksedge has adopted the skilled skills of four local professional companies and dozens of artisans in the UK to achieve this unique effect, enabling us to see such exquisite works.
 
 
 
 
The table in the "Slump" series uses a metal tube as the base, and the table glass looks like a thin film that is easily broken,
 
I hope that we can all follow these beautiful things to find our way through the conveying of hardness, softness, purity, and beauty, as well as the ingenious thinking and innovation of universal materials such as glass