Honourable Mention at Compasso d’Oro ADI

Soho by Marazzi – with the porcelain mosaic module – received a Compasso d’Oro Honourable Mention at the Compasso D'Oro ADI Awards in Rome.
The ceremony was held at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art in the presence of the Under-Secretary to the Prime Minister Gianni Letta and the leading figures in international and Italian design.

This was an important award, conferred on a ceramic wall covering product for the very first time, and means that Soho is now included in the Compasso d'Oro Permanent Collection.

The Compasso d'Oro Award – founded in Milan by a group of architects (including Gio Ponti), designers and industrialists who aimed to foster an appreciation of fine design in industrial products – has been Italy’s leading industrial design award since 1954, and is assigned as a mark of “excellence in the work both of the designer and of the company which created the product”. The condition for eligibility is that the producer, the designer, or both, must be Italian.

The Award is assigned every three years, by a specially appointed international jury, to the products pre-selected by the ADI, Italy’s Industrial Design Association, which selects the best products placed on the market each year and publishes them in the ADI Design Index.  

All the award-winning objects become part of the Compasso d'Oro Historic Collection, given national heritage status in 2004 for its importance in expressing Italy’s cultural, economic and manufacturing identity.
The Collection includes furniture, accessories, machinery and precision instruments, vehicles and industrial components, materials and consumer goods which record the evolution in taste, the economy and technology from the Post-War years down to the present day, and make up an archive of economic and cultural interest, on display until September at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

To mark the Celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification, the Ministry of Economic Development, in association with Valore Italia Foundation, has sponsored two exhibitions dedicated to the Compasso d'Oro ADI in Rome, under the title 'Unicità d'Italia': one of the historic collection at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the other with the products selected to compete for the Compasso d’Oro 2011 at the "Macro" Contemporary Art Museum, where the awards ceremony was held on Tuesday evening and where the commemorative 150th anniversary ADI Design postage stamp was also presented.

The products in this year’s competition, and still on display at the Macro, include 5 by the Marazzi Group: apart from Soho, the exhibition also features the Marazzi SistemA crystallised porcelain, the Revisioni slabs by Ragno and Hatria’s G-Full monobloc and Easywarm system.

Soho, the first new product created at Casiglie, had already received other major awards such as the EDIDA (Elle Decor International Design Award) and Interior Best Design of the World, and now it joins the Permanent Collection of Italian Design thanks to its Compasso d'Oro Honourable Mention.