The design team that calls itself FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) isn’t the first one to take the old “face vase” optical illusion seriously, but it may be the first one that attempts to create actual portraits in the thin air surrounding pottery. “Heroes of the Invisible” forms the faces of designer Mies van der Rohe and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. Those two were chosen for being two figures who explored the idea of the invisible in very different ways. original “Rubin’s vase” (sometimes known as the Rubin face or the Figure-ground vase) is a famous set of cognitive optical illusions developed around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. The illusion generally presents the viewer with a mental choice of two interpretations, each of which is valid. Often, the viewer sees only one of them, and only realizes the second, valid, interpretation after some time or prompting. When they attempt to simultaneously see the second and first interpretations, they suddenly cannot see the first interpretation anymore, and no matter how they try, they simply cannot encompass both interpretations simultaneously– one occludes the other.
