During my professional life I have known only few open-minded intellectual industrialists able to get into the complicated head of the designer, able to be patient when life becomes risky, when, for instance, the coexistence between the ideas of design and the demands of the market becoming improbable.
I have known few industrialists with this quality. Among these few I believe I can count the Arosio family, owner of the factory Glas Italia. It is a factory set in Brianza and it is specialized - very specialized - in processing large glass and crystal plates (600 x 321 cm) with cutting, tempering, laminating, glueing, engraving, sandblasting, painting and more, for the building and furniture trades.
They also invented a system to produce coloured mirror plates, by assembling two glass sheets with special films between them, films which filter and colour the light. The catalogue of colours is very wide.
I don't believe it was by chance that the gentlemen of Glas Italia asked me if I wanted to design some coloured mirrors, and of course I said:
"Yes, with great pleasure".
It is known that working with many colours is different from working with only one colour. If you have to keep together many colours there are problems among the different quantities of the chromed surfaces and the secret dynamics that the presence of colour inevitably creates on the surface. Designing with colour becomes a complicated, but liberating exercise: you can abandon the structure of the Cartesian axes and you can follow new structures, guided by colours in new and continuous dynamics.
These were the problems arising while designing the coloured mirrors. They are problems stirring the curiosity of the designer.
As they say: "May some unknown god protect us"

Ettore Sottsass
Milano, December 28th 2007