A few days ago Veronika, our store manager, wrote in the group chat: “What should I say if clients ask me about the glasses on the fountain?” Accompanying the text was a picture of Laguna~B’s window display, with its distinctive stainless-steel, cake stand-shaped fountain furnished not with a selection of multicolored, hand-crafted Murano Laguna~Bs but with cheap, transparent, everyday tumblers—ranging from the Picardie (a mainstay in all kinds of restaurants, cafés, and homes) to a graduated measuring beaker and cartoon-embellished Nutella jars, alongside other anonymous designs.
As the installation stood in our store for a few days, the 10th edition of the Venice Glass Week, the international festival of Muranese glass art, was concluding. Unlike other years, this time we didn’t participate in any event or present any initiatives. (Last year we showed a short film dedicated to Autonoma, our residency program for teenage glassmakers).
Instead, an alternative reflection emerged: While we’re constantly reminded—especially on occasions like this—of Venice being the mother of glass art, fewer people know that the connections between La Serenissima and glass aren’t solely artistic. On the contrary, until the late 60s, many glass factories in Murano manufactured exclusively functional goods—bottles, spectacle lenses, window panes, mirrors, and pharmaceutical glass like jars and vials. Since the Renaissance, the production of everyday objects had coexisted with that of the artistic pieces that made the island famous worldwide.
What’s more, zooming back into our communications office, we’ve always shared a fascination towards glassware of everyday use, especially as our pieces are, in some respects, so extraordinary (though we advocate for using them with nonchalance—keeping them in the cupboard is forbidden!). At one point Marcantonio suggested we put together a museum of drinking glasses, collecting all kinds of specimens from the weirdest to the most ordinary.
I remember when, in 2021 he asked photographer Enrico Fiorese to shoot an advertising campaign for Il Giornale dell’Arte. The brief was provocative: no Laguna~B glass should have appeared in the picture. The result was a horizontal composition, with the company name written very tiny in the lower-right corner. Above it, five clear tumblers of different provenance: a carved whiskey glass, a Pink Panther-themed Nutella jar; a tall cocktail glass; and other, unidentified ones, all of which we used to drink at the office. “Growing up in a family where glassware was always beautifully hand-crafted, as a child my favorite tumblers were the Nutella ones, which were the only industrial glasses at home.” Marcantonio told me. “I was also trying to express my idea of what Venice, and Murano in particular, should be: a global epicenter for glass in all its forms, where the industrial sector can meet and support the artistic production of the island.
“Super Normal is defined by absence—by what these objects don’t have, rather than the other way round: style, identity, originality, remarkableness.”
While the museum remained a fantasy (for now), it expressed a distinctive curiosity—the quest to identify what makes some objects irreplaceable and non-improvable, despite them being unconcerned with aesthetics and cheaply made in series by unknown hands. Writing about some heavy wine glasses he had bought in a junk shop, designer Jasper Morrison noticed how “they changed the atmosphere of the table,” despite being “made without much design thought or any attempt to achieve anything other than a good ordinary wine glass.” They possessed a “quota of atmospheric spirit,” which he considered “the most mysterious and elusive quality in objects.”
In 2007, with Naoto Fukasawa (whose essential designs you might have seen at Muji’s), Morrison proposed a manifesto for a new category of objects, which they called “Super Normal”. According to design curator Silvana Annicchiarico, Super Normal is defined by absence—by what these objects don’t have, rather than the other way round: style, identity, originality, remarkableness. In the eponymous book Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary, the designers have included 204 items that fall into the category. In the preface, Morrison speaks of the “loss of innocence” separating today’s designers from the craftsmen and artisans of previous centuries, who manufactured objects for everyday use without seeking to “express themselves or their age” or even to hold their ground against competition or forgeries.
The Venice Glass Week is obviously a great moment to celebrate glass art—but perhaps exactly for this reason, following Marcantonio’s typical countercurrent approach, we decided to put a spotlight on the objects we otherwise barely notice—the super normal drinkware that are, in Morrison’s words, the “absolute opposite of all the special ones.”
The Super Normal Glass display has now been dismantled, and the colorful Laguna~B glasses have returned, with a new composition this time. But ordinary objects still feel like essential amulets, unshakable pillars of taste and functionality. “The things we pick to accompany our glasses, we pick them because they’re such classics, so much a part of our everyday landscape, that we perceive them without having to understand them,” Erica, our in-house designer, told me. She’s the one who chooses, designs, and often builds the furniture, backgrounds, installations, and every other detail of the aesthetic ecosystem surrounding Laguna~B. For example, Duralex’s Picardie glasses are a mainstay at our events, where Murano glass wouldn’t be practical or available in sufficient quantities. They’re the archetype of normal, the exact opposite of a Laguna~B tumbler. “They go with everything, and I find them reassuring. They also help our own design stand out more by comparison.” Meanwhile, Marcantonio’s Nutella jar collection is ongoing.