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Using the Lost-Wax Process, Francesco Faccin Creates a Furniture Collection Around a Single Plank of Wood 

Faccin with the “mother-plank” of larch wood that was cast and used to create all the pieces in his Bronzification series. 

For the past year, Italian designer Francesco Faccin has been working with the historic Fonderia Artistica Battaglia on a series that looks for new applications for bronze and the lost-wax process within furniture design. The resulting works—a series of tables, chairs and tabletop objects—stem from his original idea of taking “a plank of wood—a precious commodity, by nature absolutely unique and unrepeatable,” and turning it first into a wax model, “then a bronze item to be replicated again and again in series” until it is ultimately transformed into something else. 

A larch plank (150 cm long and 7 cm wide) was used to make the initial mold and then cast in bronze to create the pieces in the collection. Despite being made from the same piece of wood, all of the resulting planks of bronze have a unique patina due to the ancient process they were made with. For this reason, variation and imperfections are a highlight of the collection, which seeks to express “a transfer, movement and action.” Faccin’s aim throughout the process was to apply a repetitive, industrial process to “reach and attract the growing sector of Design-Art." Speaking of the project, Faccin has noted that it is "more about the process rather than the shape. Wood has always been the basic construction module. Now, the stiffness of this material creates a sharp contrast with the nobility of bronze.”

Francesco Faccin will be presenting “Bronzification” during Milan Design Week at Nilufar Gallery, April 12-17.