VieLithic

The project started from the brainchild of matching the term “Veil” with the term “Lithic”, a collocation that almost sounds like an oxymoron, to create a “veil of stone” or better a flexible stone cover. 

The project aims for removing the visual weight of the material, through innovative technologies that combine ancient material with new one.
The materials’ unusual and courageous use highlights the proposed solution’s audacity, the aim of which is suggesting innovative architectural uses for marble. “Veilithic” seeks to achieve the physical paradox, illustrated by René Magritte in the painting “Le Château des Pyrénées”, to elicit an astonishment feeling in the beholder, due to the sight of a suspended veil made of a conventionally heavy material.
Starting from a square layout, the Veilithic is capable of taking more different configurations thanks to its nodes and the four “chains of rebar”, that are anchored to four mobile hooks.
The project focuses on the possibility of covering the great hotel lobby (courtyard) and conference rooms’ hall, allowing a better modularity of space through a cover which allows the formation of a privileged “locus” without involving placing walls or dividers, that alter the visual space.
In addition, the cover allows the partial shielding of reflections coming from the large glass windows or skylights, increasing the comfort and creating multiple light effects.
Considering technical standpoint, Veilithic has a total expanse of 13x13 mt and the tension of rebar chains allows different configurations. It’s made of 200 identical triangular marble slabs made of Striato Olimpico marble, that are set in a metal “basket” (made of burnish stainless steel) suitable for withstanding all the structure’s internal tensile forces, consequently the stone is exempted from structural function of all sorts.
The baskets are interrelated by steel joints (4 or 6 nodes) and, through the telescopic rods’ compression and traction, they are configured optimally, complying the tensile curves.

The project has won, in the category professional, the international contest “Coniugare il Marmo - 2015” organized by Carrara Fiere and awarded by the president of Carrara Fiere Fabio Felici, the design reviewer Decio G. R. Carugati, the designer Ignazia Favata from “Joe Colombo Studio”, Carlo Castiglioni for “Castilioni Foundation” and the designer Paolo Lomazzi from “Studio De Pas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi”.