Beyond the Conventions of Marble

By Editorial Staff - 16 June 2025
Margraf has participated in the project

Beneath marble’s enduring image as a symbol of perfection and permanence lies another story, one filled with discovery and rediscovery, a world of rupture and fracture. That is the premise behind Crash, an installation by Margraf – a leading firm in the marble industry – marking the company’s debut at Milan Design Week. Conceived as a break from centuries-old conventions, the work upturns marble’s traditional identity in an installation that lives up to its name. The installation, designed by Hannes Peer Architecture – a Milan-based studio known for its conceptual, cross-disciplinary approach – took over Spazio BIG Santa Marta in the city’s historic 5VIE district.

From the moment one first sets eyes on it, the installation announces a rebellion against the notion of marble as decorative, unchanging or untouchable. Both the company and the architect sought “to explore collision as both a conceptual and physical force”.
The pursuit of this goal took the form of taking marble down from its traditional place as wall cladding, to then present it with bends, buckles, shears and even twisted into new, more rounded forms, seemingly reclaiming autonomy from centuries of fixed expectations. Visitors enter through a space imagined as a quarry, where marble contorts into a cave-like structure before flowing into a further “revolutionary” space. Here, no longer content to stand upright in classical style, the marble curves and slumps toward the floor. At the center, a monumental slab captures the installation’s essence: frozen mid-collapse, it “rewrites the laws of its existence” by crumbling and bending, yet revealing unexpected beauty in its imperfection.

Throughout, the project draws on precedents in art and history: Michelangelo’s unfinished forms, Luciano Fabro’s emotional experiments in stone and Isamu Noguchi’s playful subversions of sculptural rigidity. Crash positions itself within this lineage of “creative disruption” by treating the material’s imperfections not as flaws, but as essential components of the design process itself. Architecture and design move forward not through linear steps, but through accidents, collisions, surprises and upheavals.

Ultimately, Crash becomes a reflection on unpredictability and the dynamism of the material, it is a collision between stasis and movement, tradition and disruption. In its folds and fractures, marble becomes a metaphor for the fleeting, fragile beauty of existence itself.