What’s the future for ceramics? A buzzing RIBAJ event hosted at Iris Ceramica Group’s London ICG Gallery contextualised it between fascinating talks on Italy’s Futurist past and a radical rethinking of a 16th-century Rome palazzo
The craft of ceramics is one of humankind’s oldest. Since the first shaping and heating of clay 10,000 years ago, the craft has developed and informed every artistic and architectural movement, remaining critical to modern processes of design and architecture.
RIBAJ readers were invited to Clerkenwell for an event touching on a few of those artistic moments and to learn about how technological advancements have progressed the ancient craft into the future.
It was hosted at the London showroom of Iris Ceramica Group – the ICG Gallery. A showcase space blending technology and ceramic materials, it offers a sensory journey through surfaces and solutions. Many of Iris Ceramica Group’s 2,500 materials clad the three floors of its flagship UK store, with countless others packed into sliding drawers, walls, furniture and reveals in a thoroughly Soane-like presentation.
Reflections on Futurism
Chiara Cola, foundation design studio lead and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, started proceedings by introducing her research around Italian Futurism, the early 20th-century movement propelled by poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti alongside artists including Umberto Boccioni and Giacoma Balla. ‘We are already living in the Absolute, since we have created eternal, omnipresent Speed,’ Marinetti wrote in his 1909 Manifesto, a document rejecting the slow past in favour of speed, youth, industry, power, and violence.
Cola presented her VR-infused artistic projects, bringing Futurist energies a century forwards through today’s technological advancements, closing with modernist poet Mina Loy’s 1914 pronouncement: ‘You prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened… but the Future is only dark from the outside, Leap into it – and it explodes with Light.’
Futurism transcended materials and disciplines – even cookery – and, as with all cultural movements, ceramics were in the mix. Bulgarian Bauhaus graduate Nikolay Diulgheroff studied architecture in Turin, where he contributed to Marinetti’s Futurist Meals cookbook. He also started working with ceramics, whimsical Futurist bowls, vases, and tea sets – designs which could be argued foreshadow Memphis Design PoMo geometries, but certainly also fit into expanded, international Art Deco movement Futurism segued into.
Appropriately, Iris Ceramica Group is the main sponsor of Art Deco: Il trionfo della Modernità (The Triumph of Modernity), an exhibition filling a series of grand rooms within Palazzo Reale, Milan. Across artworks and design objects, it considers how Deco drew on similar modernist ideals of industrialisation and technology as Futurism, but also embedded an aesthetic and narrative of ancient cultures. It’s packed with porcelain, with several of Gio Ponti’s ornate, playful vases and plates among other ceramics by Duilio Cambellotti, Dagobert Peche, and Giovanni Gariboldi.
Meeting today's acute sustainability challenges
There is a dedication to both the history and future of ceramics at Iris Ceramica Group, a firm founded in 1961. Though missing out on Futurism and Deco, it has worked across several artistic and architectural styles over its five-decade existence – and is similarly invested in today’s pressing technological concerns: net zero, carbon neutrality, and green energy.
The group’s UK head of specification, Giacomo Bertoni, brought a sense of future manifesto to the conversation in describing the company’s work on decarbonisation via its H2 Road to Net Zero action plan. By 2030, its H2 Factory, the world’s first ceramic factory designed to run entirely on green hydrogen, will be fully operable. Sited in Castellarano (a small town in the province of Reggio Emilia), it is being designed to enable the production and storage of green hydrogen from just solar energy and rainwater.
Last year, the pilot plant produced its first Ceramica 4D slab, a new technology emulating the textural depth and grain of stone and marble within a manmade ceramic, using green hydrogen and natural gas. This blend represents an initial transitional step that will reduce CO2 emissions in the short term and pave the way to exclusive use of 100 per cent green hydrogen in the future.
In Rome, Zaha Hadid Architects used some of the Iris Ceramica Group’s products in its techno-Baroque restoration and transformation of Rome’s Palazzo Capponi into the Romeo Roma Hotel. While the architectural shell and courtyard of the 16th-century palazzo was intact, few original interiors survived prior occupation – including as governmental offices. ZHA’s radical and playful addition to the building began in 2015 with designs by Zaha Hadid before her untimely passing, and more since picked up by project director Paola Cattarin and her team, to expand on with a luxury of technology and materials not possible even a decade ago.
Futurism’s sense of urgency and science, as well as the consideration of historic reference with technological futures of Art Deco, are present in the scheme. ‘Our interiors can be powerful,’ Cattarin says. ‘But we were always very respectful of the original palazzo.’ Suitably, Iris Ceramica Group provided one of ZHA’s meticulously detailed products, most notably used in the Deluxe sinuous, folding bedrooms finished with polished ebony and chestnut akin to the most luxurious yachts. Behind the bed’s headboard, part of the total sculptural form, is a sunken bathtub.
‘We selected the Iris Ceramica Group’s surfaces because of their durability,’ Cattarin explained, a nod to the products’ water resistance, strength, and ability to be formed into a shape classical marble might be, still holding a depth of grain in its body. More than just providing a product, ‘Iris Ceramica Group were very supportive during the design process,’ the architect added, ‘providing us with all the technical information we needed.’
Whatever future historians deem the culture of today’s era, it will surely be discussed as a period of rapid change and speed of technological advancement that the Futurists could only have dreamed of – but also one urgently wrestling with climate breakdown and a reflection upon the past.
Ceramics have been around for 10,000 years. But to ensure that they will be for a further 10,000, resilient and recyclable products – such as those by Iris Ceramica Group, soon to be manufactured in carbon neutral factories, with decarbonised and circular economies in mind – will be critical.