Rialto Side Table

Manufacturer: FIAM

FIAM: Fiam was born from one man's passion for glass and a dream to make glass a unique star in the world of fine furniture design.

Founded by Vittorio Livi in 1973, Fiam designs, develops and produces items of furniture in curved glass, creating them through a combination of craftsmanship and industrial processes. The company merges tradition and innovation, hand-crafting and design. Founder Livi came to know and appreciate glass from a very young age. Glass, solid and fragile, natural and artificial, ancient and industrial, is a mass of seeming contradictions, and Livi loved it for this as well as its practical qualities. Simple in its appearance and transparency, the chemistry and physics behind glass are actually quite complex. And this material of vast potential was virtually only used in the world of furniture for the production of small accessories or ornaments. In the young Vittorio Livi's creative mind, a dream began to take shape: glass would become a unique star in the world of fine design, being used to produce items of furniture which would be astonishingly solid yet beautifully transparent. From its earliest days, Fiam immediately focused on innovation as the driving force for achieving its business and cultural aims.

Each of Fiam's precisely crafted and finished products rely on the experience of skilled craftsmen - experts in technical skills such as silver-coating, bending, decoration, fusion, engraving, grinding and carving. Each craftsman is capable of predicting, quantifying, controlling and finding the right alternatives in every single case. Using the bending process, the master craftsman's experience and his ability to work in perfect harmony with the furnace operator are fundamental for controlling the perfect shapes produced. In spite of the state-of-the-art technology used to forge it, the finished item is unique: a crafted work of art. At Fiam the master craftsman is considered just as important as the designer in the piece's creation. And, Fiam sees a designer's ability to take risks with shapes as a welcome challenge to its technical expertise. The company has gone to lengths to tailor its technologies to produce its design-driven collection.

Hand-in-hand with its innovation in design, Livi has always invested heavily in research and innovation in technology. Industrially produced glass reaches Fiam in the form of sheets and precisely calibrated processes and state of the art machinery ensures that their bent glass furniture designs are perfectly formed to resist breakage and perform as a lasting furniture piece. Fiam has now reached its fifth generation of glass bending operations: the master glass craftsman is now assisted by ground-breaking technologies in terms of both instruments and materials, enabling the company to rise to the increasingly challenging demands of the designers who wish to work with this peerless material.