At the end of 2008 the first italian opera by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito was inaugurated. Called the Huge Wineglass, it was specifically designed for the main square of Pescara, a small Italian city voted to modernity, to dynamism and contemporay. The relationship between Pescara and the Huge Wineglass, who was gave way by temperature just after 60 days, is a special one, sometimes difficult, transforming the broken glass by Toyo Ito in an ongoing city’s debate.
Starting from this background and thanks to the collaboration between ZO_loft and Gumdesign To Be Toyo was born. It consists of a red crystal swinging glass, designed by Gumdesign, resting on an handmade mat-place, designed by ZO_loft, reproducing the modernist geometric design of the square of Pescara. Both are placed in a methacrylate box that remind once again to the opera of Toyo Ito. The story of the square of Pescara, thus, become a dining set, full of overlapping and parallel reading levels that allow the user / customer / citizen to look the object on different levels of awareness. From an immediate level - looking it as a dining set - to a more detailed level – looking it as an architectural model that redraws with all its details a focal piece of the city (including people walking and palm trees), through the revival of craft skills used in the glass and the patchwork of the mat-place, which recovers, reuses and rearranges well mixed scraps of cloths.
The theme of "eating/speculating", the ingenuity / simplicity of common thought, criticism of citizen on excessive costs, are just some of the elements crystallized in a dining set that allows the user “to be Toyo".
