Sabine Marcelis Casts Ten Fountains for Fendi’s Design Miami Anniversary

ART & CULTURE · MIAMI

Reading time: 9 min

Ten cast resin fountains, set on the same travertine that clads Fendi’s Rome headquarters, turned a Miami trade fair booth into a working translation of the house’s own visual language. Sabine Marcelis built each one around a single Fendi motif, from the FF logo to the Peekaboo bag, and let water do the rest. The installation marked ten years of Fendi’s presence at Design Miami, and arrived in the middle of a decade in which the house was also restoring the real fountains of Rome.

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In December 2018, Fendi turned its Design Miami booth into a fountain court. Ten sculptural fountains, each cast in polished resin and set on a plinth of travertine, lined the space in a gradient of colour that ran from pale yellow through amber to a deep, almost brick red. Water moved constantly across their surfaces, catching the light differently at every hour of the fair. The piece was called The Shapes of Water, and it was designed by Sabine Marcelis, the Rotterdam based designer who has built her practice on the specific, unglamorous chemistry of cast resin.

Fendi commissioned the installation to mark ten years of the house’s presence at Design Miami, a run that began in the fair’s earlier years and had, by 2018, made Fendi one of the only fashion houses with a sustained annual presence there. The date lined up with another decade: 2018 was also the tenth anniversary of the Peekaboo bag, the house’s best known accessory, designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 2008. Marcelis was one of five designers invited to reinterpret Fendi codes for the fair that year. Her fountains were the centrepiece.

The project was not a metaphor stretched thin to fit a brief. Marcelis works in water, light and resin as a matter of course, and Fendi’s own design vocabulary, stitched leather, a fur pattern, a logo drawn by Karl Lagerfeld, a Roman palazzo, gave her ten separate problems to solve in a material she already understood. The result reads less like a fashion house borrowing a designer’s name and more like a genuine translation exercise: architecture and product design rendered as ten working fountains.

Ten fountains, one house language

Each of the ten pieces in The Shapes of Water took a single element of Fendi’s visual identity and rebuilt it in cast resin. Two fountains formed the interlocking double F, the logo Lagerfeld devised for the house in 1965. Another took the outline of the Peekaboo bag itself, the shape Marcelis has described choosing to “freeze” rather than decorate: “The idea was to simply present the bag as it is, but optimized. In the end I chose to freeze the design with a resin block, exaggerating the shape frozen within.” A further fountain reworked Astuccio, the fur pattern Lagerfeld introduced in 1972, and others drew on Tegole’s fish scale repeat, the tailored geometry of Intarsi, the classical rhythm of Labirinto, and the stitched leather of Fendi’s Selleria workshop. The final two fountains stepped outside the product line entirely: one rendered the colours of a Roman sunset, and one distilled the arched, coffered facade of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the building that has housed Fendi’s headquarters since 2015.

The fountains sat inside an all white booth with an illuminated back wall, so the resin read as the only source of colour in the room. Air pumps concealed inside the travertine bases kept water circulating over each surface, which is what let the pieces catch light rather than simply hold it. Colour shifted with the water’s movement and with the time of day, from a pale, almost translucent yellow through to a saturated orange and, on the deepest pieces, a brown close to Roman brick.

Choosing travertine for the plinths was not a decorative flourish. It is the same stone that clads the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and setting resin, an entirely synthetic material invented in the twentieth century, on top of a stone Rome has built with since antiquity, was the installation’s clearest statement about the house’s identity: modern technique standing on historical ground, without pretending to be older than it is.

Sabine Marcelis: a decade of resin, light and colour

Marcelis was born in Alkmaar in the Netherlands in 1985 and moved to Waihi, New Zealand at the age of ten, later returning to study industrial design at Victoria University of Wellington. She completed her training at the Design Academy Eindhoven, graduating in 2011, and founded her own studio in Rotterdam shortly afterwards, where it remains based.

By 2018, resin was already her signature. Her Candy Cube tables, cast in blocks of saturated colour, had become one of the most recognisable objects to come out of the Dutch design scene of the 2010s, and her studio had built a body of work around a consistent set of interests: how light behaves inside a translucent material, how colour shifts with the angle of viewing, and how industrial casting techniques can be pushed toward a result that feels closer to glass or gemstone than to plastic. That vocabulary is what made her the obvious choice for a brief built entirely around water, light and colour. The Shapes of Water was not a departure for Marcelis. It was her existing practice, scaled up and pointed at a new client’s motifs.

The Fendi commission also sat inside a wider run of fashion and luxury collaborations that would define the following years of her career, including later projects for Chanel and for Fendi itself, among other houses drawn to the same combination of industrial process and jewel like finish that runs through all of her work.

Travertine and the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana

The building the fountains quietly referenced has its own history. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, nicknamed the Square Colosseum for its stacked rows of arches, was designed by the architects Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula and Mario Romano, with Marcello Piacentini overseeing the wider development and adding the travertine facade that defines the building today. Construction ran from 1938 to 1943, as the centrepiece of the Esposizione Universale Roma, the international exhibition Italy had planned to host in 1942. The building was inaugurated, still unfinished, in November 1940; the exhibition it was built for never took place, and the surrounding EUR district was completed only after the war.

What the building offers a designer today is its geometry. Six rows of nine arches repeat identically on all four sides, two hundred and sixteen arches in total, over a square base close to fifty two metres on each side, the whole structure faced in travertine cut to read as solid stone. Fendi restored the palazzo and moved its headquarters there in 2015, converting the ground floor into exhibition space for Italian craft and keeping the arcaded facade as the building’s defining feature. It is that facade, and that specific stone, that Marcelis’s fountains echo on their plinths, and that one of the ten pieces reproduces directly in miniature.

A decade of Fendi at Design Miami

Fendi’s relationship with Design Miami had, by 2018, run long enough that Venturini Fendi could describe the house’s early participation as something close to a novelty: at the point Fendi first joined the fair, in the years before design and fashion routinely shared a stage, she has said the house found itself standing alone among fashion labels at a fair built around furniture and collectible objects. A decade on, that position had reversed. Fashion houses were a regular presence at Design Miami, and Fendi’s own commitment had grown from a single dinner into a full annual presentation built around a different designer or collaborator each year, a run that eventually carried the house all the way to its own centenary presentation at the fair’s twentieth edition in 2025.

The Shapes of Water was the clearest statement of that decade to date: not a showroom of existing product, but a commissioned, site specific artwork built entirely around the house’s own codes, handed to a designer with no prior link to fashion. The five designers invited to rework the Peekaboo bag that same year, working across the United States, China, Korea and Japan as well as the Netherlands, extended the same idea across a wider set of hands, but it was Marcelis’s fountains, installed at the centre of the booth, that carried the anniversary.

The fountains Fendi had already built in Rome

The most interesting fact about The Shapes of Water is not in the installation itself. It is in what Fendi had been doing with real fountains in Rome in the years immediately either side of it. In January 2013, the house announced it would fund the restoration of the Trevi Fountain, Rome’s largest and best known, at a cost that ultimately ran to roughly two and a half million euros; the fountain reopened, fully restored, in November 2015, the same year Fendi moved into the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Six months after the Design Miami fountains were unveiled, in June 2019, Fendi announced a second phase of the same commitment, funding the cleaning and restoration of four more historic fountains across the city, including the Acqua Paola fountain on the Janiculum hill and the fountain at Piazzale degli Eroi.

Read against that timeline, The Shapes of Water stops looking like a one off metaphor and starts looking like the middle chapter of a much longer, literal project. Fendi spent the 2010s restoring actual stone fountains across Rome, then paused in December 2018 to build ten artificial ones out of resin for a fair in Miami, then returned to Rome the following year to fund four more real restorations. The Design Miami installation sits precisely between the two phases of that patronage, and none of the coverage written around the fair in 2018 drew the two threads together. Marcelis’s fountains were not simply themed around Fendi’s Roman identity. They were built in the middle of a decade in which the house was, at the same time, keeping Rome’s actual fountains running.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file The Shapes of Water as a fashion house borrowing a fashionable designer’s name for a week in Miami. What actually happened was more specific than that. Sabine Marcelis took ten separate pieces of a hundred year old house’s visual vocabulary, a logo, a bag, a fur pattern, a stitching technique, a building, and translated every one of them into the material she had already spent a decade mastering. Nothing about the result depended on Fendi’s name to work; the fountains would have held up as resin sculpture on their own terms; the reference simply gave each one a second, more specific meaning for anyone who recognised it.

The stronger version of the story sits in the years around the installation rather than inside it. Fendi restored the Trevi Fountain in the first half of the decade, built ten artificial fountains in Miami at its centre, and funded four more real restorations in Rome the following year. The Shapes of Water was never really about water as a design theme. It was one house’s decade long habit of making fountains, expressed once in resin instead of stone. It was also only one booth among thirty-three that December, and our full roundup of Design Miami/ 2018 covers the rest of that year’s fair, from J. Lohmann Gallery’s Korean ceramicists to Todd Merrill Studio’s laminated wood and bronze.