Transparent, lightweight, beautiful, sustainable: today glass is also smart, and it is the material of choice for contemporary architecture, inside and out.
Glass is a material that has been enchanting people like no other for three thousand years, thanks to its unique qualities of transparency and visual lightness, and its dual nature — at once fragile and strong. It has something magical about it. It is born from amorphous powders and comes to life through fire, even today from a liquid magma that, in even the most advanced industries, calls to mind the ancient myth of Vulcan's forge.
Lightness, precision, substance, multiplicity — these are some of the values, qualities and distinctive traits that have emerged as mega-trends in the first decades of the new millennium: glass embodies all of them. It is one of the emblematic materials of a revolution that has swept through the entire industrial world almost without our noticing.
"The second industrial revolution," wrote Italo Calvino in 1985 in the book 'Lezioni Americane', "does not present itself like the first, with overwhelming images such as rolling mills or streams of steel, but with bits of an information flow running through circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines are still there, but they obey weightless bits."
Change, in fact, no longer happens through sudden leaps, as it did in the twentieth century — a child of mechanics — but through fluid, continuous shifts. We are, in every sense, in the thick of that "liquid society" described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in which change is the only constant, innovation advances without pause like a slow fluid spreading in every direction, and uncertainty is the only certainty. Architecture, too, has undergone profound transformation over the past twenty years — the architecture that gives shape and image to the cities of our contemporary world — and this visual change is plain for all to see: against the heaviness of stone, that immutable metaphor for eternity, and the imposing presence of reinforced concrete, symbol of industrial progress, glass has asserted itself in architecture, first entering the scene as a complement to the structural virtuosity of steel and later as a sophisticated structural element in its own right, with an almost virtual quality, visually rarefied and light, that has become one of the defining symbols of our time.
The representation of lightness, which glass embodies par excellence through its transparency, has entered the collective everyday imagination almost spontaneously, without our even realising it. Lightness is in fact a quality demanded today of all the objects in our contemporary landscape — a landscape that is increasingly, even if this may seem paradoxical, situated in the realm of the immaterial: it is a tendency encouraged by the most advanced technologies and the most interesting research into innovative materials, effects, possible surface finishes, and the miniaturisation of size and volume, while the performance requirements that objects are able to offer grow in parallel. It is a characteristic that permeates all third-millennium products, from buildings to the smallest everyday objects — the mobile phone being one example above all others, having shrunk to minimal dimensions in just a few years.
Glass is a solid, substantial material, and it has the remarkable ability to age well — or rather, not to age at all — unlike concrete and plastic, which adapt poorly to the passage of time. Glass, even the lowest quality glass, has an intrinsic elegance in its DNA that only wood possesses, or perhaps steel. Certainly not plastic, nor concrete, nor metals subject to corrosion. Glass is multiple and multifaceted. It lends itself to a plurality of expressive languages and to endless possibilities of design interpretation. With glass, the creative utopia of ranging freely across an "infinite design possible" seems to be within reach. Within this infinite multiplicity, everyone can find, through the use of glass, their own personal expressive voice.
True to yet another paradox, glass, thanks to the quality of transparency, is a material of strong visual identity, capable of acquiring — in its applications, from exterior and interior architecture, as the starchitects of international architecture from Jean Nouvel to Renzo Piano have shown — a powerful visibility. Above all, glass is the ultimate sustainable material, 100 per cent recyclable — a quality no other material can claim.
Since the 1980s, technological development and experimentation with glass to enhance its performance have advanced in leaps and bounds, encouraging the use of this material in architecture and in civil and residential construction.
A new generation of "smart" glass has emerged — materials capable of responding dynamically to environmental changes, ensuring high levels of indoor comfort and reducing energy consumption losses. Glass that can respond to external stimuli by altering its characteristics of transparency, luminosity, colouration and degree of solar radiation screening, while retaining its structural properties unchanged. The evolution of technical and structural solutions today makes it possible to use glass in façades without any steel structural elements being visible on the outside, allowing architects to realise, from a design standpoint, their most ambitious dream: light, suspended, airy, immaterial, apparently weightless structures that transform at night into volumes of pure light.
A pioneer in the use of glass in the kitchen is Gabriele Centazzo, founder of Valcucine, a company that from its very beginnings in 1980 set itself apart as exemplary and avant-garde, quickly becoming a point of reference for innovation across the entire manufacturing sector. From Friuli, a designer, entrepreneur, experimenter and inventor — but above all a great visionary — Centazzo is regarded as a guru of sustainable design. He transformed the face of the kitchen in the 1980s, working on the principles of sustainability, using innovative technologies to employ the smallest possible quantity of material, entirely recyclable, while ensuring long product life and reducing toxic emissions in the production cycle.
Among his primary objectives was making the kitchen 100 per cent recyclable: so in 1987 he designed Artematica in Vitrum, the first highly experimental model of a kitchen made entirely of glass, which completely changed the paradigm — both stylistically and structurally — of thinking about and creating the kitchen.
"I have always considered glass a magical material," he says, "whose working has generated mystery for three thousand years. Eco-sustainable and durable, glass reflects the philosophy that characterises my approach to design, which is oriented towards the pursuit of wellbeing in the kitchen — because it responds perfectly to the needs of those who live in it, and because it manages to create a sensory, material and above all healthy space."
A symbol of pioneering spirit and the sustainable vision of a company, the Artematica in Vitrum kitchen is turning thirty. Retracing the milestones of the technological research that made it possible to create such an innovative product at the time, one wonders what the future scenarios and new applications and developments of this material in the fields of architecture, design and the home might be. The subject was discussed on Wednesday 11 October at the invitation-only talk "Vetrospettiva. Glass is more" with Gabrielle Centazzo and Cino Zucchi, held at the Valcucine Milan Brera showroom, corso Garibaldi 99, Milan.