Fiam

Fiam was born from one man’s passion for glass.

Founded by Vittorio Livi in 1973, Fiam designs, develops and produces items of furniture in curved glass, creating them through a combination of craftsmanship and industrial processes, actually merging tradition and innovation, hand-crafting and design.

Vittorio Livi came to know and appreciate glass from a very young age. Glass, solid and fragile, natural and artificial, ancient and industrial all at the same time, is a mass of seeming contradictions, and Livi loved it for just that, as well as for its practical qualities. Glass is environment-friendly and hygienic: it may look simple, because of its transparency, but both its chemistry and its physics are really very complex. And this material of vast potential was virtually only used in the world of furniture for the production of small accessories or ornaments.

Fiam sees a designer’s ability to take risks with shapes as a welcome challenge to its technical expertise. The company has even created one-off technologies to produce some pieces. For example, in 1982 Massimo Morozzi came up with the design for the Hydra coffee table, with very pronounced shapes it would be difficult to obtain with the machinery then available. So Fiam invented a special machine (called the Paser) capable of pushing water and abrasive powder to a speed of one thousand metres a second – three times the speed of sound! And to produce the Illusion table by Philippe Starck, Fiam had to create a plant capable of processing glass at one thousand degrees.