Lungomare

LUNGO MARE is a cast stone landscape element. It has emerged from the latest proposals for street furniture design, aimed at generating harmony by working on natural and artificial landscapes. LUNGO MARE represents a new generation of furniture that uses the expressive capacity of forms in an act of creative and spatial freedom. Architects Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue designed this seat for the public domain in the transition between the sea and the beach, bringing to life their dream of turning ocean waves and sand dunes into meeting points. This unique and seemingly light furniture rests subtly on any sort of pavement, integrating into its natural setting. Its warped surface permits different ergonomic postures, while a stamped texture in the manner of a random deposit of sand or taut skin adapts to the fineness of the human skin. LUNGO MARE is the paradigm of a focus on sensitivity and poetry that allows the symbolic and formal aspects of things to be highlighted. This proposal sits between two opposing poles: between figuration and abstraction, between order and liberty. LUNGO MARE began to be materialised in 1997 during conversations between Enric Miralles, Benedetta Tagliabue and Emili Farré-Escofet: “We wanted something for LUNGO MARE that would be welcoming, like a beach, and comfortable, like dunes or waves in the sea. We wanted almost a pier on the beach, made of cast stone. It resembled a flying carpet. We thought it would be able to fly to other places and land in more urban areas, in parks, on lawns, on a campus... We spent more than two years completing the configuration of this element, working on prototypes in the workshop in a stimulating dialogue with the industry. Using this complicity, we generated a meeting point... which at the end of the adventure, also reflected an absence and a place for memory”. EMBT This street furniture was awarded the Golden Delta Prize ADI-FAD 2001 by the Association of Industrial Designers for the Encouragement of the Decorative Arts (ADI-FAD).