Renzo Piano knocks on the door of design with his Teso collection for FontanaArte. Who says glass is not as hard as steel?

World-famous architect Renzo Piano made his design debut with a coordinated line of furnishing systems for FontanaArte, using only glass − a tribute to the company’s production history. This high-end collection included a table, with a choice of rectangular or round top; an open-ended bookcase; console shelving. Thick float glass was used both for the table tops and legs, and for the console and bookcase shelves and uprights. Each element is held together by the tension created by a special system of chrome-plated metal ties, which compress the components as if they were a single block. Teso’s deceptively simple shape and modular options front all the complexity of the tensile structure, a recurrent architectural feature in Renzo Piano’s work.