ICG GALLERY BRAND NEW LOOK
#UnlockTheExperience
ICG Gallery
61-67, Old Street
London EC1V 9HW
For the Clerkenwell Design Week, the Iris Ceramica Group Showroom shows off its new look, evolving into an immersive, interactive, technological and engaging Contemporary art gallery
The new ICG Gallery in London goes way beyond the exhibition of the surfaces, it is a concrete expression of the values guiding the Group: technological research, attention to beauty, innovative solutions and attention to the environment.
The new ICG Gallery is much more than a Showroom of high-end natural ceramic surfaces, it is a place where you can tangibly and virtually experience the Group’s materials and values.
An immersive space where new technologies blend with ceramic materials that are the result of an ancient tradition, made using pioneering systems, opening up to new worlds and offering a unique and “repeatable” experience.
Visiting the new Gallery is the perfect opportunity for taking a sensory journey, a continuous mix of the real and the virtual, discovering different architectural interpretations and points of view each time.
Exteriors
Walking in the rain
The exteriors are already an immersive experience:
the movement of the passers-by is a stroll through a virtual rain that turns into clean energy.
A digital representation of water that produces green hydrogen used to power the new H2 Factory.
The digital installations in the window invite passers-by to become active subjects who, with their movement, produce green energy. It is an invitation to dialogue with the installations, not just look at them. An engagement that suggests you enter the Gallery to find out about the other innovations too.
Level 0
Phygital experience
The interior is a space to be lived.
On the ground floor, visitors cross a world created with augmented reality, discovering for themselves the benefits of the eco-active Active Surfaces®, for a world marked by health and well-being, in perfect harmony with the environment.
The visitors’ active experience then continues, using a simple, user-friendly App, entering another dimension, virtual yet absolutely real, where ceramic materials improve the environment and our interaction with it.
Level +1
Material Gallery
The upper floor is the realm of the Material Gallery, a space to enter in a journey through matter, browsing the textures, formats and thicknesses, endless sources of inspiration for designers and design lovers.
Play with the surfaces, creating moodboards, combinations, compositions and experimenting new forms of application.
The materials literally attract: Visitors can test the magnetic laying function “ATTRACT. Smart Living goes magnetic”, the latest innovative solution registered by the Group.
Level – 1
Comfort Lounge
On level -1 we enter into the depth of technological research, the Group’s distinguishing feature. An intimate space highlighting the design applications, the touch surfaces for home automation, tailor-made furnishings and smart solutions for green architecture.
Cloud to Cloud
SENSORY INSTALLATIONS
Edible Clouds
c/o ICG Gallery
During the Design Week, visitors’ experiences area enhanced further in an individual guided tour describing the creative process and production cycle in the world’s first green hydrogen-powered ceramics factory (H2Factory): a circular transformation process that starts from nature and returns to it, returning that which it borrowed, creating a new, sustainable material. Ceramic materials which, for the event, take on the form of a fundamental food for humans.
The sensory experience path traces the circular production process of the H2 Factory, “Cloud to Cloud”, consisting of 4 interactive stations.
It all starts with a cloud – a dew catcher - and its rain water that, as in the process of electrolysis, separates it into hydrogen molecules: metaphorically speaking, green edible bubbles floating in the air.
Visitors are invited to knead and shape a primary mixture of water and flour, as if it was ceramic material made of earth and water. The bread is then steamed in a steamer, using a form of clean energy produced by the steam which, returning to the atmosphere, helps to recreate the initial dew catcher cloud.
The process is circular, perpetual, almost magical.
The metaphor is not only ideal but also real, because at the end of the journey the visitors can taste the finished product.
Cloud to Cloud
c/o Solus Ceramics Showroom
80 Clerkenwell Rd, London EC1M 5RJ
The "Cloud to cloud" cycle is also the concept of a second installation at the Solus Showroom to be inaugurated during the Clerkenwell Design Week and open to the public for the next three months.
The sensory expression of being inside the rain, floating in a cloud, on a sea of water. Visitors can immerse their body and “soul” in a cloud, experiencing life in an almost suspended world, filled with micro-drops of water, listening to the reverberating sound of the rain.
Cloud to Cloud
A Celebration of Hydrogen in Water
Designed by Szczepaniak Teh