Friends: Finemateria
A walk with Finemateria through the streets and familiar places of Milan, helps to symbolically retrace the genesis of the design that in a short time has made them one of the most recognised and appreciated names on the international design scene. Design that is expressed through the representation of processes, cultures and materials, taking the form of the telling of a story that conveys a message. This is why Finemateria perceives form as the materialisation of the idea, according to a process applicable to a product, research, event or space.
Gianluca Sigismondi and Stefano Bassan founded Finemateria in 2020 and immediately demonstrated the strength of the material-experimental process, enhancing the sensorial aspect in each project.
Milanese architecture, simple and essential, is thus the backdrop to a selection of the first products conceived as research work, up to those that have gone into mass production. We see them walking around with the Comfort / Uncomfort chair that analyses the contrast between companies and craftsmen, the result of which is something contradictory but extremely symbiotic. Or with Please Hold UP which makes explicit the experimentation with polyurethane foam. But it is stainless steel, QuadroDesign’s elective alloy that becomes their most recent narrative interpretation, confirming their matrix as creators of ideas, emotions and memory in relation to materials.
The story unfolds along two recent products: ‘I Giorni’ Calendar and Fontanella. Both projects find their roots in a happy encounter between Quadro Design and Finemateria, confirming the company’s focus on young creative design voices that already have their own clear vision.
The second project, ‘Fontanella’, is a traveling water fountain designed in 2023 to accompany ‘Rooting/Radicarsi’, the first urban arts and design festival organised and hosted by Dopo? Space conceived as a relational device between the cultural centre and the Corvetto district, which hosts it, in Milan. Fontanella is presented as a dynamic drinking water station, always ready to put itself at the service of people by moving with them.
It is made entirely of steel and defined by a structure reduced to a minimum, an extreme formal synthesis, capable of highlighting the technical and material qualities of the QuadroDesign branded products that are installed on it: in the upper part, tap, knob and a hi-fi flavour drain grate, while in the lower part, the various technical components are left bare and visible.
The collaboration with Finemateria is part of QuadroDesign’s path of strengthening its identity by scouting for young talents with whom to create projects with a cultural value based on absolutely free interpretations of a noble material such as stainless steel.