Hasta La Ideas

Francesca Gattello was completing her master’s in product design at Politecnico di Milano last spring when she decided to enter Scenari di Innovazione (Innovation Scenarios), a competition that tasks students with creating new products for small artisan companies. After visiting many of the contest partners’ shops, Gattello was struck by huge sacks of waste outside a marble manufacturing facility, which she learned posed a serious environmental problem. Given the expense of proper disposal, many manufacturers opt to simply pour their stone waste into streams—damaging the local ecosystem. Gattello decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, incorporating stone waste into pure clay sourced from another local shop to create an experimental material that could be used for a line of housewares.

Gattello’s project ended up winning the Scenari di Innovazione and, as a reward, she was able to prototype the products proposed. For her line of pots, cups, vases and bowls, dubbed Calcarea, the Verona-based designer drew inspiration from her collaborators’ existing products. “I chose to work with Attucci Marmi, a little stone industry, to get the waste, and Rossoramina, a family-run ceramic company, to develop the product concept, the prototypes and the collection,” Gattelo says. From Rossoramina, she got the idea for the vessels’ distinctive vertical grooves, as well as for using two surface finishes—”a transparent glazed one,” Gattello says, “to show the complete claylike production process, and a rough one, which shows the core mixed material, its nature, its visual and tactile qualities.”

Gattello had to hand-sift the stone waste to remove impurities, a process she hopes to automate for the production run.

The vessels are made via a combination of mold-casting and hand-turning on a wheel.

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