Point Supreme Architects from Greece bring a welcome jolt of authenticity and innovation in the art of manipulating marble. They created a ten by two metre marble mural especially for the Interior Design Show 2010 which took place in Athens on November 2010, responding to the brief which invited them to produce a piece focusing on an actual material. Their mural is a tribute to marble itself.

Working with a historically charged material is no easy job!  Marble’s texture and composition could be truly magnificent but in order to be effectively used supreme skills and endurance are a must. Classical sculpture praised marble and lent unparalleled splendor to it, which nowadays is very difficult to surpass. Yet, the team managed to merge modern techniques with history by treating the marble mural like a living object with all its complexity, identity and personality.

“Marble mural is automatically associated with heavy and permanent applications and we wanted to completely detach it from those, so we thought of shojis- Japanese sliding doors, while the variety of marble patterns, colors and textures led us to treat each one differently therefore creating the overall mural effect,” Konstatinos Pantazis, partner of Point Supreme Architects explains.

There is an almost poetic narration in the process of making the mural because the seven marbles selected carried their own inherent patterns tracing back to hidden stories, which waited to be revealed. Each one was unique; each one had something to tell!
“One looked like a cow, another like an elephant skin, the next like a plant, the next like jewelry, then another one like a bad photocopy, one like a water and one like a topographic map,” Konstatinos Pantazis underlines.

The stories told by the marbles were picked up by the architects who then applied a variety of different techniques universally on the mural to guarantee the coherence of the piece. They used cutting, sculpturing, cnc engraving, water cutting, digital printing and painting. The employment of these techniques further dramatized the patterns enhancing an artistic effect on the piece.
“For example the cnc engraving on the golden-looking marble becomes more ornamental, the printing on the ‘bad photocopy’ one becomes linear and so an and so forth,”  Konstatinos Pantazis explains.

Collaborating with many people on the same project was critical to Konstantinos Pantazis who believes that this maximized inclusivity and richness, in contrast to the exclusivity and cleanliness of the typical marble aesthetics. 
“The exciting thing was that no one could foresee what the result would be like; each one was doing his task but was unable to visualize what would happen next. The person who had a relatively holistic view of the piece was the painter who came last, but even then the light effects had not happened so he did not know which areas were translucent,” Konstatinos Pantazis.

But whether you love the marble mural or loathe it there’s no denial that the incorporation of disciplines from sculpture to design and painting honors the material and thus the marble itself!

status: built
program: exhibition for Interior Design Show 2010
location: Athens, Greece
collaborator: Nikos Sepetzoglou (painter), Hector Papadakis (sculptor)
team: Konstantinos Pantazis, Marianna Rentzou, Beth Hughes, Jean-Sébastien Lebreton, Ioannis Gio
collaborators: Nikos Sepetzoglou (painter), Hector Papadakis (sculptor), Perrakis Marbles (supply), Smponias Marbles (CNC), Grammatikas Marbles (water cutting), Opsis (steel frame), Workshop (furniture), Print All (digital printing supervision)
year: 2010