POLICROMA

Policroma: note sulla collezione | Policroma: notes on the collection

MILAN INTERIORS

ANNALISA ROSSO

Design journalist and curator

Cristina Celestino’s smartphone contains a folder of images named

“Milan”. Photographs that are more like notes. Images of architectural

features, materials or details of shapes encountered by chance during a

walk, these pictures cannot be described as merely a vague “source of

inspiration”. This filing system, created in response to a fleeting instinct,

is an integral part of the working method adopted by the architect

and designer, who starts off without preconceptions – or “free”, as she

puts it – before drawing inputs from a vast world of references, from

Hermès scarves to the works of the great Masters (in the specific case

of Policroma). This accumulation, partly spontaneous and party the

outcome of in-depth historical knowledge and study, naturally activates

a process of synthesis and personal interpretation common to all Cristina

Celestino’s opus.

The wall covering collection designed for CEDIT was no exception,

although in this case the designer was dealing with a project with

variable sizes, reaching all the way up to the architectural scale. In

her own distinctive way, she combined a variety of references. Adolf

Loos’s passion for coloured types of marble, especially Cipollino. Carlo

Scarpa’s angular metal frames and marmorino plaster in Venice. The

French fashion house’s square silk scarves. The entrance halls of Milan

palazzos, Gio Ponti, the city’s Cathedral. All expressed in the designer’s

own language: well balanced geometrical forms, subtle colours (shades

similar to those of Scarpa himself), an effortless, almost restrained, playful

elegance. The mood is that of the homes of the enlightened bourgeoisie

who shaped the history of Milan, Celestino’s adoptive city and an endless

source of inputs. She has worked its interiors, including some of the

least expected – a 1928 tram, the historic Cucchi confectionery store –

hybridising her own style with the existing context. An imitative effect

which is also the key to the meaning of the new Policroma collection: the

marble varieties replicated using the CEDIT technology are all from Italian

quarries that are virtually “worked out”. This revives an increasingly rare

material as a “living” presence, in a different form which makes no claim

to replace the natural original. Quite the contrary, Celestino immediately

states her intention to imitate, by combining marble and marmorino

plaster in some variants with a contrasting frame (a typical feature for her,

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