TO BE TOYò

DESCRIZIONE: At the end of 2008 the first italian opera by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito was inaugurated. Called the Huge Wineglass, it was specifically...

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 provincial 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, sometimes happy, 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".