Life beneath the surface

“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.” This is the opening of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a bizarre and mysterious book written by the English reverend Edwin Abbott Abbott and first published in 1884. Set in a universe with only two dimensions — length and width — it is the autobiographical account of a square who becomes aware of the existence of three-dimensional space and is utterly astonished by it.

 The volume you are holding in your hands also has a flat, angular protagonist: the tile. In the early decades of the 20th century, this modular object—perfect for mass production— experienced a golden age. Just look at the photographs taken inside the Marazzi factories: workers in overalls oversee rows of tiles moving through a tunnel kiln, emerging fired and ready for glazing. Once packed, their fate is to line the bathrooms and kitchens of Italian homes, making them more hygienic and livable. During those years, the tile became an allegory of the entrepreneurial mindset, driven by rational thinking and the pursuit of efficiency.

Some time passes, and this seemingly modest and predictable element begins to evolve in unexpected ways. First, it embraces a broader color palette, thanks to the hand-painted tiles by ceramist Venerio Martini. Then, its sharp corners soften, taking on a more fluid geometric shape. It’s the 1960s, the golden age of Italian design. With Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designing the Arco lamp for Flos, Anna Castelli Ferrieri creating Componibili modular furniture for Kartell, and Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli developing for Marazzi the famous Triennale, the “four-curve tile”, as if to suggest that the tile should dare to embrace the sinuous lines of creativity and intuition to better reflect people’s desires.

In the following years, Marazzi entrusted creatives with transforming the tile into a meaningful object, adorned with decorative patterns that extend beyond its borders, linking the individual module to the wall in a synthesized gesture typically reserved for works of art. At the same time, the company worked hard to ensure its production chain was increasingly efficient: it patented the single-firing technology, a process that significantly reduced production times, created machinery capable of producing large-format tiles, and developed innovative techniques for color fixation. It was the “squaring of the circle,” the moment when form and function converged into a single, grand innovative project, which, in turn, led to enormous international success.

The tiles of this period already differ greatly from the polygons that inhabit the universe of Flatland, where the revolution of color was brutally suppressed and “the greatest length or breadth of a full grown inhabitant… may be estimated at about eleven of your inches.” Yet, like the square in Abbott’s book, it too is about to gain an awareness that will enable it to see the world from a new perspective. Starting in the 1990s, in fact, thanks to continuous research aimed at both technical and formal innovation, Marazzi products begin to claim over all architectural space, including the exterior facades of buildings, raised flooring systems, and the cladding of both private and public interiors.

While other design objects take center stage inside the home, the Marazzi tile assumes a different role. It becomes an intersection of architecture and interior design, a membrane that allows the building shell to breathe and engage with the domestic space, a guardian spirit of the home and those who live within it. Philosopher Emanuele Coccia writes that “every home ought, in the end, to be the structure that allows one life to live through the Other: not an envelope of glass, steel and cement that separates us from the rest of the world, nor the window of variable geometry that enables us to make our own ‘I’ visible, especially to ourselves, but the mental and physical quest of mutual initiation between lives.” This is the concept of human design, which embodies Marazzi’s intention to interpret design as a tool in the service of the ultimate project: to improve life and relationships between people.

To celebrate Marazzi’s 90th anniversary, we wanted to start from this idea of the tile. A variable unit of an enveloping and polysemic surface under which we shelter to eat, sleep, wash, dress, undress, read, write, draw, play and listen to music… but also enjoy the silence, laugh and cry, argue sometimes, work, love. We figuratively lifted it to see what’s beneath, inside, and around it, with the help of the company archives and a diverse group of designers, who were asked to tell us about the concept of home, what it means to them, and how they imagine it will evolve in the future. Just as in Flatland the discovery of the third dimension leads the protagonist to boldly speculate about a fourth, for Marazzi the exploration of architectural space is a never-ending design journey, one that will allow the tile to continue evolving.

To conclude, it’s no coincidence that the tales of the company and those dedicated to the home are woven together in this book. After all, the home is the quintessential place where the tile truly finds its purpose. And following Marazzi’s journey means observing the evolution of this extraordinary product, tracing the way we live, etched into those grout lines.