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For Milan Design Week, Italian ceramics giant Iris Ceramica Group revealed not only a striking Zaha Hadid Design installation but also a stunning revitalised showroom.
Iris Ceramica Group (ICG), one of Italy’s foremost producers of ceramics, had a dual presence at this year’s Milan Design Week in two distinctive experiences – a Zaha Hadid Design-created installation as part of Fuorisalone 2024 and a newly transformed showroom, where the physical and the digital merge to create what the company calls a “phygital” realm and which reflects ICG’s commitment to technological innovation in combination with the finest Italian craftsmanship.
The installation – in the remarkable 13th-century Piazza dei Mercanti – was called Poesis Materiae and was conceived by the globally renowned design studio to highlight the fluid form of ceramic materials, emphasising their strength and subtle beauty. Zaha Hadid Design interpreted Iris Ceramica Group’s natural ceramic elements to create an installation that showcased a modern alternative to traditional ways of seeing ceramics.
“Our installation challenges conventional application methods by exploring how fluid and curvaceous design concepts can be achieved with this medium – further evidence of the virtually endless possibilities that ceramics offer,” says Maha Kutay, co-director of ZHD.
ZHD reinterpreted the material’s solidity in a landscape featuring a series of curving paths that demonstrated the potential dynamism of ceramic slabs. They achieved this by rethinking the slabs in motion, and the unexpected sinuous forms created a landscape you could stroll through and almost get lost in. “Visitors were able to walk around Poesis Materiae as well as through it to visually experience the installation from any angle, as the design entails a sense of movement and the consequent ever-changing sense of perspective and viewpoint,” says Maha.
Simultaneously, the company also unveiled a beautifully refurbished showroom a few minutes’ walk away on Via Santa Margherita, where design aficionados were encouraged to #UnlockTheExperience. The newly named ICG Gallery Milano goes beyond the mere display of the company’s immense range (some 50 collections comprising more than 2,500 products) to, instead, express the artistic and technological soul of Iris Ceramica Group.
Over three floors, the gallery is designed to be a space where the group’s values take on shape, colour and consistency, and where visitors can immerse themselves both physically and digitally. The ground floor, for example, features material displays and video walls and a bespoke corner where customers are encouraged to interact with the ceramics, mixing and matching them using the Material Library to create inspirational mood boards.
It also includes a workspace for architects and designers that features the brand’s latest surfaces, and which leads to a vault that protects the haute-couture ceramic surfaces of the Bottega d’Arte collection. These features, along with displays of the eco-active Active Surfaces and Hypertouch smart slabs, all speak to Iris Ceramica Group’s mission: to re-engineer ceramics to improve human-environment interaction. The setting embraces and delicately narrates the group’s universe, and its key values – technological innovation, sustainability, beauty and excellent quality – can be found consistently across all three floors of the gallery.
