Ghost, Made in Intermac

Ghost means shadow, trace, appearance, spirit, soul. Only glass is able to transform this abstract concept into physical object.

It was presented for the first time at the Milan Furniture Fair of 1987, was immediately awarded for its harmonious and elegant design in a contest of the magazine ‘Interni’, which invited the visitors to choose the most innovative product. The ingredients of this miracle are technology, which makes an alternative material such as glass ductile and tough; the cleanliness of the object, which accredits it among the most demanding defenders of ecological values; the transparency, which makes it invisible and thus appropriate for any kind of furniture; the eternity of its smoothness, its duration, its beauty. 1

It is a totally innovative armchair, the like of which had never been seen before - an imperceptible, transparent seat, which thanks to its monolithic shape and invisibility, was entirely different to any other chair available on the home design market.

The Ghost armchair opens the way to the use of glass based on the workability of the material.

Ghost takes its form from a single GC Planibel Clear sheet of 12mm-thickness glass, which is first cut by a high-pressure, high-speed water jet (1,000 meters per second) of the Master 33.3 3-axes machining centre. This single, high-precision cut is followed by the bending process, during which the glass is heated.

After being cut, the glass panel is shaped and polished on the machining centre, which guarantees the level of polish required for a object of such elevated design. Only then can the glass be heated and bent into its final shape. Ghost, chief product manager Daniele Livi explains, "is the only Fiam product that needs to be bent twice to achieve a perfectly ergonomic shape".

Software plays a key role in the design and creation of such objects: it's the software that, combined with the creative genius of the designer, allows the necessary freedom and simplicity that makes an otherwise extremely complex object possible. The perfect integration of the software with the Intermac machining centre means that the machine can faithfully recreate the object as designed.