GamFratesi for Cappellini

People look for equilibrium every day, trying to balance the diverse requirements of work and family, dealing with problems and suffering, and investing energy in the projects that lie closest to their hearts.

With difficulty, a certain balance between all these factors is attained, only to be lost all over again. Such was the state of mind of the Italo-Danish duo Enrico Fratesi and Stine Gam when they were taking stock of their work for an exhibition at the Palazzo Litta last year.

“It came to us spontaneously at that moment to work on the quest for balance,” they explain. “Other artists like Alexander Calder and Bruno Munari did the same thing. Our wish as architects was to industrialise the idea and work on it in a purely technical way. What you see here at Cappellini is a hanging partition made of fabric pressed with PET polyethylene, a recycled material that absorbs sound in addition to screening the view. The repetition of modular elements, all with the same attachment, creates configurations of three, four or five petals.”

“We spent much time in the lab fine-tuning the project in order to find the perfect balance that was unobtainable by drawing or calculation. As time passed, the project increasingly became a metaphor, because moving the weight of the elements by a single millimetre could make it collapse – exactly like in real life. Our difficulty as designers rather than artists was that we could not resort to tricks to make the project work. Eleven people with different tasks worked on Screen System. The industrialisation process is quite particular. You become part of a team, which is great, but also scary, because if one of the eleven decides to change one element, the equilibrium changes.”

Design: Stine Gam, Enrico Fratesi

14–19 April 2015
Cappellini
Salone del Mobile
Fiera di Rho
Hall 20 / E01 - F06
Milan