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Still & Sparkling

BOOKMARK ARTICLE

A series of hand-blown bespoke glass objects comprised Nendo’s Still & Sparkling collection, which showed last week in Milan.

It’s often hard to tempt visitors into the basement at a design fair, but an arrangement of Nendo’s Growing Vases – which were launched during the 2011 Salone del Mobile – signalled the entrance to an intriguing series by the Japanese design firm for Czech Republic brand Lasvit.

Beautiful in their own simplistic and naive way, diagrams illustrated the manipulations of glass that take place to form each piece in the series. Inhale Lamp, for example, is the result of blowing glass into the form of an air bubble and then sucking the air back out; it’s created by negative air pressure.

‘The most exciting thing for me is not to control the process of blowing, but to see what new surprises it can produce,’ says Oki Sato, founder of Nendo.

While Sato often works with translucent and transparent materials, his 2011 collaboration with Lasvit marked his debut in designing with glass. The 2012 collection includes vases, lamps and tables, all individually created from hand-blown glass.

Photos courtesy Yoneo Kawabe, Filip Šlapal & Jaroslav Moravec. 

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