Design reflections preceding the ARTCIRCE project.
LANDS
An Eagle Over Friuli-Venezia Giulia
An eagle soars over Friuli-Venezia Giulia — a region in north-eastern Italy suspended between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea.
From above, the landscape unfolds…
Towards Pordenone, where the soft urban tones of Venice still resonate among gardens, villas, and the winding waterways of the countryside;
towards Gorizia and Trieste, where the richness and variety of the terrain — hills, mountains, cliffs, and sea — become a metaphor for the intricate interplay of Slavic and Balkan cultures;
towards Udine, guardian and witness of the ancient layering of medieval memory, rooted between Italy and the German-speaking world across the mountains.
Space and time are inseparable — two faces of the same physical dimension: when space contracts, time expands.
The simultaneous view of the landscape from above thus seems to invite a diachronic reading, where geography reveals history.
One can almost hear the distant echoes of medieval villages and castles scattered across woods and clearings, mountains and plains.
That same resonance lingers in the area where Pietra Piasentina is still quarried today — in the Julian Pre-Alps, in the foothills of north-eastern Friuli-Venezia Giulia, within the province of Udine.
Used since Roman times — in the construction of Forum Julii (modern Cividale del Friuli), founded by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC — and later by Renaissance masters such as Andrea Palladio, Pietra Piasentina embodies a timeless dialogue between nature and architecture.
In architecture, it is admired for its extraordinary tonal range and for its versatility in both interior and exterior applications.
This sedimentary limestone of secondary origin was formed through gravitational processes triggered by tectonic movements of the earth’s crust.
Highly compact, it offers exceptional resistance to compression and bending; it retains its colour under atmospheric exposure and endures countless cycles of frost and wear.
Its base tone is a refined grey, yet it reveals a spectrum of nuances — from the light grey of the sawn surface to the deep grey of the polished finish — crossed by delicate white veins and small brownish accents.
The seemingly simple, two-dimensional circularity of planets and stars seen from afar conceals the profound complexity of their true, three-dimensional nature.
Similarly, the circular disks of the LANDS coat hooks in Pietra Piasentina evoke a subtle analogy with distant, imaginary worlds — offering a tangible, poetic synthesis between material and cosmos.
