Peroni Releases 25 3D Printed Bottle Designs Paying Tribute to Italian Culture

Andrea Morgante, an architect at Shiro Studio, and nine other new-wave artists from Italy have worked to reimagine Peroni’s 25cl bottle. The bottles all 3-D printed in white nylon powder are explorations of form in relation to Italian culture and design. The collection is titled 25.0 and was sponsored by Peroni and by M&C Saatchi. The pieces were displayed at The House of Peroni, known for bringing together the best of Italian creativity, before making their debut at The Design Museum in early June.

Each bottle represents an aspect of Italian culture, some of which are instantly recognizable. There is also a hint of Italian chauvinism, to be expected in a celebration of something so quintessentially Italian. The bottles are not meant to be practical models but rather statements that pay tribute to the aesthetic of Italian design and its precedents. There are designs showing influences ranging from ancient Roman ruins to Baroque sculptures to 1960s icons.

The first step in reimagining the bottle was to create a 3-D model of the current bottle. That model was then manipulated multiple times and, after careful evaluation, 25 designs were selected for production. The whiteness of the bottles obviously conjures up images of the white marble so pervasive in the history of Italian art and architecture. Italian art has also always been marked by a fascination with structure rather than surface, the modeling used by Giotto and other Renaissance artists being so particularly striking because of the weightiness of the figures forms, rather than their surface detail. Morgante described the reasoning behind the decision to keep all of the bottles white:

“The narrative is about the analogy between the shape and the specific symbolic reference. I didn’t want the texture or color to distract from this message, so the choice of white, or rather lack of color, was to enhance the visual perception of the bottles and therefore. The achromatic choice also ties all 25 bottles together.”

The bottles are undeniably beautiful, ranging from simple, such as a design that traces the outline of the current bottle’s silhouette, to complex forms such as an amorphous vessel reminiscent of their knees statue of Proserpina. Each design is a commentary on the value of Italian heritage all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire.

One bottle shows a small tree growing from its side inspired by Green Tree shoots that spring up at Roman ruins, “it makes those ruins somehow still alive. And I see that only in Rome,” Morgante said. While there are trees growing from ruins all around the world and Morgante’s remark is undeniably culturally chauvinistic, that does not diminish the beauty of this creation which takes full advantage of 3D printing’s capability to produce complex forms. We will most likely see a series of initiatives for bottle redesign inspired by these artful creations; the key will be to see if they can capture the beauty inherent in these, or if other collections simply resort to crass commercialism and the frenzy caused by creating collectibles.

What do you think of Morgante’s work?  Let us know in the 3D printed Peroni bottle forum thread on 3DPB.com.  Check out some additional images below.