INFO - B2B24 - Il Sole 24 Ore

Edited by 24 ORE Cultura, Il design
del bagno nella cultura d’impresa
(Bathroom design in company culture),
via the idea of the bathroom in
the collective imagination, to narrate
the history of an Italian company.
You have to flick through nine rooms
before finding The tenth bathroom.
The bathroom of the future. Because
to speak about Catalano, the approach
taken by Domitilla Dardi and
Carlo Martino with this volume,
does not involve “a celebratory monograph”
but “an excursion through the
collective imagination” which, divided
into two parts, one for each author,
narrates a history whose only certain
fact is that it began in 1967, and a name,
that of Mario Rossi, who is a kind of
human extension of Catalano.
Moving from “general interpretations”
to “functional conceptions”,
through to arriving at “more speculative
dimensions”, the typologies
of bathrooms examined by Domitilla
Dardi introduce an end of the century
scenario, one in which new product
demands take form and minimum
standards of bathrooms give way to
a company in the province of Viterbo
that is ready to transform a modest
entrepreneurial size and its connection
with a peripheral geographic
area, like the district of Civita
Castellana, into major advantages
for highly innovative proposals.
From here the ball passed to Carlo
Martino, an intimate connoisseur of
the company, in which he is responsible
for artistic management, who
traced out the salient stages, starting
from that for Sfera Modulare,
the line which was developed in ‘92
by Nilo Gioacchini, heralding an approach
that was entirely original
within the context of ceramic sanitary
ware.
From there to the revolution constituted
by Sistema Luce was a short step,
even though the strategic value of
production capable of exploring the
same concept in numerous typological
and dimensional variants could
later become a limit.
That it did not was due to the fact
that the rectangle and square became
Zero, giving life to that polyhedricity
on which Catalano production was
founded, and which took form from a
single washbasin, available for typologically
different installations. A
concept which, after ten years, during
past editions of the Cersaie in
Bologna, the company now chooses
to celebrate with a specific celebratory
stand, and the realisation of the
line Zero Star, focusing on the maximum
reduction of ceramic thickness.
A design that has also been realised
thanks to the technological investment
undertaken by the company in
the complete automation of a single
advance firing line, working together
with Sacmi di Imola. Indeed,
everything we have been happy to
talk about in this volume includes
not only the voice of famous designers
and products that have made the
Catalano brand famous, but also sales
and communication strategies - making
sure that 40 years of history and
tradition continue to be exported to
places which, in 1967, seemed only the
wildest of dreams.
© Catalano/Ph Studio Ciapetti
di/by Antonella Camisasca
2011 5
99