Italy has been hit particularly hard in the recession by the low price competition of China and India. But it is fighting back with design and innovation, as an international group of architects discovered when they were guests of the Italian Trade Commission. One of the companies they visited was Luce di Carrara. NSS was with them.

Dante Venturini does not believe there is a Carrara marble. He thinks there are many Carrara marbles. So do his customers. Some want more veining, some less. Some want a lighter colour, some darker. Dante does not fall back on the old argument that stone is a natural product and you must accept it with all its variations. If his customers want certain features of the stone and not others, that is how Dante’s company, Luce di Carrara, will supply it. He separates the stone into its different characteristics and supplies it as a range of products with different names.

And he does not leave it to the vagueries of the human eye to decide where one brand stops and another begins. A computer linked to a scanner that checks each tile at the end of the totally automated production line makes the decision to pre-determined criteria after the stone has been through a dryer. It means if you buy Raphael or Donatello this year and want a tile to match it next year all you have to do is order another Raphael or Donatello.

“You have not to say any more Carrara, but say Raphael,” explains Dante, speaking enthusiastically in English to an international contingent of architects visiting his factory and showroom in Vezzano Ligure in the region of Liguria – Italy’s fourth largest stone region after Tuscany (with Carrara), Veneto (with Verona) and Sicily.

Literature from Dante’s company, Luce di Carrara, is inspirational. “I don’t want to show you what I can do, I want to show you what you can do,” says Dante.

An architect from France complains that the traditional names of the stones have not been included. Architects across Europe are governed by the same rules that are encompassed in BS EN 12440 in the UK, which requires, among other things, that a stone specified to the standard should be given its traditional name.

Dante listens thoughtfully. He promises in future a new column will be added to the tables of information in his brochures that will include the traditional names of the stones. He is happy to learn from his customers and supply what they need.

Luce di Carrara is a new company – it is in its fourth year. But each year Dante has engaged internationally famous architects to find a new way of using the stones he sells. He has used those innovations at exhibitions under the names of the designers. Previously Italians Francesco Lucchese and Enea Nannini have produced designs for him. Last year it was Foster+Partners.

Rather than coming up with a new way of using the stone, Fosters put together ‘Foster Kits’ of materials, which are mostly stone but also include complementary man-made products that Fosters’ experience tells them will work well together with the stone.

The kits come in four colour combinations – sand, grey, red and black & white. They are intended to be used as a guide to designers aspiring to reach the heights of Fosters.

John Small, head of product design at Foster+Partners, was among the architects visiting Italy as a guest of the Italian Trade Commission (ICE), who are also taking an exhibition of Italian stonework to other countries to show how Italian design and innovation can enhance projects across the world.

John says of the Foster Kits that “as well as setting new standards in quality, the range addresses the impact of stone on the environment, exploring how stone’s longevity can be optimised and the energy demands of its processing mitigated”. Exactly how it does that is a little elusive but… hey!

John is working with Luce di Carrara on the back-lighting of stone in tables using a patented LED lighting system the company have called Luce di Fusa. It eliminates the spotting and shadow affect that is apparent with most backlighting.

Luce do not claim to have invented any part of the system, just the way it is all put together. Dante: “This is typical Italian imagination – putting together things that exist in an outcome that is magnificent.”

The LED light source is at the edges of stone illuminating a grid. The marble is laminated on to Plexiglass, which is not easy to achieve because the coefficient of expansion of marble is 10-6 while the coefficient of expansion of Plexiglass is 10-5. In other words, if you glue them together the resulting composite will tend to bend as the temperature changes.

Dante says they have overcome the problem, achieving guaranteed stability up to 40ºC. When using onyx, they have found that the most desirable 3D results and strength are achieved using the stone 1.2cm thick.

Before Christmas a first attempt at a long table using the system was on display at an exhibition of innovative use of stone in Palazzo Ducale in Genova, the capital of Luguria.

The exhibition was visited by the international guests of ICE. It was not huge, but brought together table-top designs in stone, again by some top international designers, with the exhibition itself designed by Francesco Lucchese. The slate quarried in the region featured significantly, as well as Liguria’s historically important red marble, famous as flooring in the Vatican.

There were 15 slate companies and 15 marble companies involved in the promotion of the materials. Their motto: integration, innovation, internationalisation.

In other words they are looking for new ways of using stone in conjunction with other materials to sell on the international market. The reason, of course, is to compete with the cheap stone coming from the Far East.

Dante Venturini says: “This field, stone, is already changed because of competition with China and India. We had to change our attitude since two or three years ago. It’s not a problem of becoming bigger. It’s a problem of becoming conscious of what the market needs. You need profit and to achieve that you have to empathise with what the client needs. More and more we have to think about the end user and the architect has to be a catalyst in that process.”

The Italians cannot compete on price, so they have to find ways of using stone that customers across the world will be prepared to pay more for.

To do that, they say, they are using the language of design rather than the language of stone. Everything in the Genova exhibition had two elements to it – two different finishes, two materials, heavy and light, light and shade, permanent and temporary.

Luce di Carrara’s contribution to the exhibition is the Sweel lamp pictured at the top of the previous page. It even had two designers, Setsu and Shinobu Ito of StudioITO in Milan and Tokyo. It is made in Carrara marble backed by Plexiglass.

The rings had to fit together snugly, so two consecutive slabs of stone cut from the same block were used to make two sets of rings, because even the 1mm kerf produced by the waterjet cutter used to make the concentric rings was too great.

The waterjet cutter was set with slightly different radiuses for each set of rings so that half the rings from one set would fit precisely into the rings of the other. Being from slabs so close together in the block, the veining is a good match.

Dante told NSS: “I’m tremendously pleased I have solved most of the problems associated with using Plexiglass with marble. Putting them together is like putting a turtle with a snake; one moves and one is rigid.”

Like most of Italy, Genova is dripping with history. Recent renovation work on apartments in the city exposed Roman and medieval stonework that had been hidden behind Renaissance alterations. As Dente puts it, the people in the region have stone in their DNA.

But in spite of being an important economic centre, Genova’s significance is diminishing because of its limited opportunities for expansion, being squeezed between the Alps and the sea. Its population is falling and currently stands at 611,000.

But it is fighting back. One of Genova’s most famous living sons is the architect Renzo Piano, who worked with English architect Richard Rogers to produce the Pompidou Centre in Paris, to name just one of his many credits. He still has a studio in the mountains behind the city of Genova, although he spends most of his time at his practice in Paris.

He designed the floating offices in the harbour of Genova where 30 architects will be employed this year working on the redevelopment of the city with the intention of reversing its declining fortunes.

Genova once challenged Venice as the most important and wealthy port of the Mediterranean. It wants to regain such a position and part of its rennaisance involves cutting a 50km link through the Alps to connect with the main rail network of Europe so that ships from the Far East currently destined for Rotterdam will be able to cut two days off their journey by unloading at Genova instead. That, they believe, will mark a new dawn for the fortunes of Genova.