Technological Quartz Steals The Show at Design Shanghai 2019
On March 6, over 400 manufacturers and countless designers descended on Design Shanghai, the leading international design event in the Asia region. Now in its sixth year, the three-day-long show explored how eastern and western design traditions can work together to create spaces of beauty across several design sectors, including kitchen and bath, workplace, and luxury settings. The show took place in the Shanghai Exhibition Centre.
One of the 400 manufacturers to make waves at Design Shanghai was COMPAC, the Spanish surfaces company. Under the moniker “The Surface Beyond”, COMPAC’S booth at Design Shanghai continued the conversation about their latest offerings begun at KBIS 2019. This included a replica of Crater CC296, a sculpture designed by Arik Levy and robotically carved from a block of solid COMPAC material.
“The crater represents the nature of another planet,” explains Levy. “Its vertices create an endless visual formation, in which the eye completes the non-visible parts of its surface. This piece not only offers a new geometry for our vision, but also a colorful structure in which great kinetic energy is on show without the need for real movement.”
COMPAC’s booth at Design Shanghai also featured examples from their Ice of Genesis collection. Levy conceived of Ice of Genesis and drew inspiration from the frigid, ice-crackled lakes in the Arctic for its look. It contains dynamic veining and rich coloration that make Ice of Genesis a show-stopping example of what manufacturers can accomplish with today’s material technologies. For Design Shanghai, COMPAC upped their game with a new color in the Ice series, Ice Green. Its coloration is similar to that of jade and features soft veining in creams and whites.
Additionally, visitors could examine the full breadth of COMPAC’s Unique Collection at Design Shanghai. Unique does not merely emulate the look of marble but surpasses it. The collection features five styles ranging from shock white to obsidian black with authentic-looking veining embedded in each one. What makes Unique a far better option than specifying marble is that it is rendered in technological quartz, which far surpasses the more porous marble when it comes to durability and ease of maintenance. And because it is fabricated and not excavated, the possibilities for its scale and shape are endless.
Design Shanghai ends on March 9th.
