ANDRÉ FU LIVING

The TAC/TILE’ Collection, a lighting collection for the home, is conceived to explore the materiality of glass – an ode to a truly tactile material used in religious, institutional and monumental architecture.

The design journey began when Fu researched the history of glass used in an urban context, most recognizably in the Maison de Verre in Paris, built in 1932 and known as the House of Glass, or in the tradition of Czech metropolitan passageways. Fu admired this architecture for its honesty of materials, adoption of an industrial aesthetic, and its rejection of ornamentation. For Fu, glass blocks possess a unique sense of boldness, yet remain distinctively translucent unlike any other material.

With this idea of celebrating glass for its tactility as a basis for the collection, Fu drew inspiration from traditional Chinese tiled roofs, as well as the triangular form of the distinctive Flatiron Building. The notion to reinvent the modernist glass block then came to mind, and Fu came up with a purist triangular profile as the core form of this lighting series.