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.
Hand-in-hand with its innovation in design, the founder of FIAM, Vittorio Livi, has always invested heavily in innovation in technology. Industrially produced glass reaches FIAM in the form of sheets. After the initial cutting, grinding and milling stages, the sheet is ready for bending, a process which starts with preheating to 630 °C. It is fundamental for the glass’s temperature to be absolutely uniform during this stage, because even tiny differences cause the sheet to break. At less than 600 °C, the vitreous mass crystallises and can no longer be moulded, while at a higher temperature it may become too free-flowing. To deal with these problems, over the years and as technology evolved, the small natural gas-fired bending furnace used to process the glass was replaced with another, larger, oil-fired one, and then by another powered by electricity, to guarantee better control of temperatures and the transformation of the heat from static to dynamic. Instead of refractory bricks, nowadays insulation is provided by high-tech ceramic insulating tiles of the kind also used on the space shuttles. Originally made from clay, the die is now produced in thermal steel.
FIAM has now reached its fifth generation of glass bending plants: the master glass craftsman is now assisted by ground-breaking technologies in terms of both instruments and materials, enabling the company to rise to the increasingly challenging demands of the designers who wish to work with this peerless material.
