Fiam Glass Home Office Furniture
8 September 2010
“Passion Flower”
Fiam is an Italian company that runs on that most vital of all human impulses, passion. It was founded in 1973 by Vittorio Livi, born of his love for glass, a feeling he’d had from a very early age. There is so much about glass that inspires, attracts, and fascinates so many of us, but with Livi, it became a passion. It is hard, it is fragile; it is rigid, it is endlessly plastic. It is a practical product and an artistic medium with boundless opportunities for those who create. It is a bundle of contradictions, the sum of which add up to a whole of boundless applications and possibilities, and from the moment he first encountered it, Livi had a passion for it. The result was the company he put together, the better to gather like-minded people and explore the undiscovered countries of glass art.
Fiam is so passionate about glass, and the many possibilities of glass, that they have actually created one-off technologies to produce some of their pieces. They have also studied the properties of glass, learning the exact temperatures at which glass is bendable, but not breakable, and learning, too, that even a slight difference in temperature can cause glass to break. To deal with the many problems they began to encounter when they pushed the limits of glass, they developed small, natural gas-fired bending furnaces to process glass, the better to guarantee the absolute control of temperatures they required. Fiam has now reached its fifth generation of glass bending plants, which means that the master glass craftsman has the benefit of ground-breaking technologies in terms of both instruments and materials. And it means that those who do the design work are limited only by their imaginations which, judging from their output, is not much of a limitation at all!
Our case in point would be what first caught my eye with Fiam, the absolute ultimate in desks, I believe. And 
granted, I’m a bit biased. I have a simple wooden writing desk I purchased almost forty years ago and refinished, dying it green. For all its mistakes (first major refinishing project) I love it still because of its grace and uniqueness. But, boy, howdy! These people make me look like, well, like the absolute amateur I was when I refinished that desk!
What they’ve done with their Atlas desk/table is nothing short of amazing. It’s a tempered glass tabletop supported by glass sections that have been stacked and sculpted into shapely legs that just absolutely blow my mind. I’m told, too, that this design is available in various heights and sizes, so it can be used as a contemporary coffee table (shown here with a deliberately curved top), a dining room table, or as we feature at the top of this blog, the desk to end all desks. I cannot think of anything more elegant than what they have created. And it’s proof again, I think, that the one flower that never fades is. passion.
Joseph
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2 Responses to “Fiam Glass Home Office Furniture”
September 10th, 2010 at 12:10 AM
This is a real passion of mine. Thank you for writing such a well informed and easy to follow article, I can’t wait to share it with my friends.
office furniture Brisbane
February 14th, 2011 at 6:30 PM
Thank you for this great article my friends would be love to read this, I will share this to them thanks