Artistic flux

Artistic flux
An extraordinary light sculpture and art gallery aesthetic plays centerpiece for Rome’s White Gallery

By Mark Faithfull, London Editor
March 08, 2010

Cristiano Corte

Located inside Rome’s recently refurbished Modern Art Building in the Piazza Guglielmo Marconi is a huge and eclectic new lifestyle store concept—White Gallery. The 54,000-sq.-ft. store, which opened in late 2009, brings together high-end fashion, entertainment, books and a restaurant under one roof.

The idea for White Gallery was conceived by Claudio Casetti, and was fleshed out by regular design collaborators Studio Id4 and Eco Arredi. The interior design aesthetic has been based on an “art gallery, presented as a white box,” Casetti says.

A major element of the design is an extraordinary light sculpture—called “Fluxus”—which is suspended overhead and flows through the space like a fluid fabric of hand-made glass. Creating a signature emblem for the store, Fluxus is the result of the cooperation between Venice, Italy-based lighting designer/manufacturer Andromeda and designer Karim Rashid, who designed the individual glass element “Knit,” along with artist Michela Vianello, whose inspiration gave concrete shape to the overall concept of the sculpture.

Having gained a reputation internationally for its custom-made creations, Andromeda was approached three years ago by Casetti, who was in search of a wow factor. “The concept was on our mind already,” Vianello recalls. “Our research laboratories were working with the Knit elements designed by Karim Rashid, developing compositions of single glass elements which could be made extremely versatile. But it had never been done before.”

The company had to face a series of technical challenges. First, the sculpture is enormous and comprises 80,000 glass elements in five colors. The lighting is provided by 5,000 punctiform micro lights distributed on the internal surface of the wave. It took seven months for the glass-masters to make all the glass parts and a huge effort to work with the materials and laser techniques to cut the iron frame delicately enough to give the feeling of the wave.

The final installation in Rome covers a surface area of some 600 sq. ft. and uses 80,000 hand-made glass Knit elements—13,000 pounds of glass, steel and technology.

“Fluxus is the iconic symbol of White Gallery,” Vianello says. “The whole place is structured as one single white box, where you would expect to find pieces of art instead of outfits. Fluxus makes this feeling clear and self-evident. There is no other lifestyle store, no matter how luxurious, that has a predominant artistic force like Fluxus spreading emotions to its audience.”