Who said that terracotta is outdated?
For those (like me) who have always been used to having tons of pots around the house, terracotta looks familiar, inspiring warmth and evoking ideas of craftsmanship and authenticity. Terracotta lives beyond the Instagram convention and the passage of time, it is immortal, and thankfully some designers have given a more dignified, contemporary and appropriate form to terracotta, lighting up a spotlight on its unique characteristics, in architecture as well as in design.
One of them is Patricia Urquiola, who designed for Mutina the Celosia collection, at the same time a three-dimensional covering and a building element with a strong ornamental character, to separate the rooms.
Matteo Brioni with the raw earth has shaped the Arazzi collection, a series of decorative wall elements, completely customized and in different finishes.
Jaime Hayon has transferred his super pop spirit to terracotta. The result was a collection of vases for BD Barcelona, already exhibited in Milan at Fuorisalone 2019 on the occasion of the exhibition Inspired in Barcelona, a compendium of the best Catalan design.
Still, on the Fuorisalone circuit, the MasQueSpacio studio designed a site-specific installation to celebrate the centenary of the Poggi Ugo furnace. In this space, terracotta is a bridge between past and present and between nature and artifice.
And while San Marco Terreal presented the Habitat collection, with terracotta surfaces in different finishes designed to make the living space unique, less precious but certainly more irreverent was the idea of the “Museo della Merda” (Museum of Shit) in Italy, which gave a second life (in complete safety) to a certainly not very valuable material, creating tiles of… Merdacotta®.
Ivan Granolla
