Marco Piva: how to design with simplicity, harmony and elegance

6 June 2023

“What I love most about my job is given by the awareness that every day one can imagine and try to create something new, useful and beautiful: there is an uninterrupted territory where the creative action of the urban planner, the architect and the designer is needed more than ever”. Marco Piva is an architect with a great history and experience and has the talent to feed this baggage with the enthusiasm of a debut, of the discovery of a new project. With his practice, he introduced the new Plaza collection for Horm at the last Salone del Mobile in Milan, in which he concretely and punctually declined the principles of simplicity, harmony and elegance at the basis of his approach.

The Plaza collection for Horm has a strong narrative connotation, where does this desire to evoke an idea of travel in the project come from and what are the main characteristics of the collection?

I have always defined myself as a “traveller even before being a designer”: I am a passionate traveller, I love to know the world, meet other people and cultures, confront myself with different realities.

Evoking the journey for the Plaza Collection project, created with Horm, therefore also took on an emotional connotation for me, a reminder of the places that inspired me. In fact, in the collection, the stimulus for the conception of each individual product comes from the territory, from some of the most well-known European squares in the collective imagination. The furnishings in the collection are aesthetically impeccable and at the same time functional and distinctive: dynamic and light elements but with a characterizing soul, dictated by shapes and finishes, which blend with living spaces to create new spaces for contemporary socializing. The sculptural appeal of the Alexander, Trafalgar and Marien tables joins the enveloping volumes of the Vendome and Concorde chairs, creating connections with the rigorous geometries of the Mayor and Dam cabinets and the refined elegance of the Imperio consoles and writing desks: a transversal capsule collection, composed of heterogeneous elements, but complementary to each other. Just as the Squares are historically the symbol of the aggregation of the city, the new Plaza collection aims to be a means of promoting conviviality, public or private.

What are the values that you carry forward in your projects and transmit to your work team?

Simplicity, harmony, and elegance are the objectives that I pursue in all my projects, together with research on materials and production processes, whether they are artisanal or industrial. These values, which were also the basis of the process that led to the creation of the Plaza Collection, are emblematic of my approach to a form of non-mass design, which wants to appear exclusive.

What I try to convey to my working group is a design vision capable of combining humanism and technology: by now we know that space and time are not categories defined a priori but relative, changeable, still unknown, and surprising phenomena. It is we who define and experience them with our senses and with our thoughts day by day.

What are the current challenges and priorities in architectural design?

I believe that architecture represents a promise that the architect makes to the city, to the people who live there. As an architect, I design and build living places, intended as both internal and external spaces; therefore, my priority is not only the customer, but the whole context in which I find myself operating.

The current challenge of architectural design is being able to propose new visions and above all new strategic solutions, indispensable for achieving the necessary balance of our planet which, today more than ever, is the priority to consider. Inside Studio Marco Piva we are reviewing all the design processes, focusing on new contents and values to be included in our projects, to reach levels of aesthetic, functional and even ethical excellence, in relation to the major underlying issues affecting the development of our global society, in the awareness of the inalienable limits imposed by sustainability, by the use of raw materials and energy. I am convinced that today we are living in a unique moment, we have the scientific and technological knowledge necessary to start a new creative path, a process aimed at generating “new visions” of the future, at rethinking our way of living, of conceiving cities, of building houses, to produce the objects that are needed for our lives, to relate to nature and, why not, to create new relationships and connections.

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