Design | Gentle Giants: Tower Vases Pay Homage | CFile

Italian designer Michael Breschi (1984) studied Industrial Design at Florence University and graduated in 2010. He founded his own studio, Gentle Giants, in 2012. The studio works on a diverse range of projects exploring the fluid borders between art and design. As his website suggests, Breschi is something of a romantic, “Pleasure to me is wonder: the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”

This is a good description of the elegant series of water tower vases that Breschi began a year ago when, after meeting the owner of a porcelain company, he was invited to learn the techniques of ceramic-making first hand. He spent eight months using the company’s facilities to perfect his craft. “After several mistakes and discarded moulds, I completed my vases,” he says in an interview with of Caitlin Tobiasz of Icon Magazine. While industrial towers and vases share similar water-storing properties, the decision to create vases actually came from Breschi’s experiments with porcelain: “At the beginning I wanted to do some sculptures, art objects; then when I began to understand the work techniques of china, and the propensity of this material to make hollow objects, I decided to make vases.”

As a boy, Michael Breschi would visit his father at work in Prato, a town in Tuscany, and he became fascinated with giant structures and industrial landscapes. Then, at university, he was introduced to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial structures in Europe and the United States: “It was just an epiphany – their work brought me back to childhood,” Breschi says. “From there was born the desire to transpose these memories into reality.”

Image above: Michael Breschi’s Industry Porcelain vases.