The Italian-Colombian designer Lucy Salamanca reinterprets porphyry, the most popular stone used for urban paving across the world, to create new interior design products featuring a light and eco-friendly soul.
This is the essence of her latest work, created for the Italian company Odorizzi, a proposal for a different use of stone which is usually known as the material use to pave roads in all four conrners of the globe.
A new way to observe and craft material for architects and interior designers to use, created by "interpreting - according to Tiziano Odorizzi - the artisanal and sustainable nature of stone with sensitivity, curiosity and passion: it is naturally coloured, irregular and textured, and can be teamed and used whatever the shape of the extracted piece. “Lucy Salamanca, continues the Managing Director of the Trentino-based company – “has the right approach to stone for Odorizzi, enhancing the value of its natural features."
Laser-cut slabs, textured patterns as slim as sheets of paper pierced by light, which creates a series of effects and games that are unexpected from a material such as stone, a lightness of structures to reinvent the uses of the material itself, a wise re-use of waste materials obtained from quarries: this is the message sent by Lucy Salamanca in this project.
Lucy Salamanca's works are an integration of nature and technology, which she embellishes with her feminine vision and with her Italian "savoir-faire" teamed with her typical Latin American vitality. These genuine visions look to the future, where the technical aspect is teamed with the culture and requirements of the target market, without the designer imposing her own style.
Using porphyry today as a material means not only proposing an unusual material for the world of design, but also working with a material that is timeless, a material filled with history: just think how the great monuments of time were built with porphyry, for instance the red disk that marks the position of the emperor inside the Hagia Sophia Basilica in Istanbul.
