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At the Milan Design Week 2024, a video installation by Francesco Meneghini unveils the latest version of the SPOKES AMBIENT lamp designed by Garcia/Cumini.

A scenographic tunnel that captivates the gaze, a choreography of video, music, and light highlights the innovative feature of Spokes Ambient compared to the original design: personal management of the lighting effect. Thanks to the two independent and dimmable LED sources, with Spokes Ambient, it’s now possible to adjust the illumination according to your needs and preferences: the upward-facing source illuminates the environment with reflected light, while the downward-facing one illuminates the work surface. Lightweight volumes that contain the light and project a kaleidoscope of lights and shadows.

“We observe a flow of landscapes that defy the ordinary, a sequence of desert scenarios, punctuated by the slow wave of elevator horizons that seem to almost breathe. In the intersection of these interpenetrating images, the visitor travels while listening to the pulsation of an unprecedented cosmos. This is light that transforms, that narrates, that invites to get lost in a silent expansion. Foscarini, with this installation, not only illuminates but plays a visual melody for the eyes”.

FRANCESCO MENEGHINI
/ Director and Video Maker

Unique and mesmerizing mind-bending animations that blur the line between reality and fantasy: this is the distinctive style in the art of Oscar Pettersson, a Stockholm-based 3D motion designer participating in our “What’s in a Lamp?” project.

In his series of artworks he brings Foscarini’s iconic designs to life with hypnotic looping animations that are out of this world. Taking inspiration from the design stories behind some of the company’s most loved lamps, he transformed those stories into captivating neverending loops.

The luminous core of Eugeni Quitllet’s Satellight is a fragment of light that flies, seeking freedom. Le Soleil by Garcia Jimenez spins and magically holds a metal ball in balance on the edge of its irregular bands. In another artwork, the organic, irregular shape of Gregg by L+R Palomba is created when flying spheres collide while Giulio Iachetti’s Magneto dances with its signature magnetic sphere, like a snake charmer mesmerizing his cobra. Marc Sadler’s Twiggy dances a graceful choreography, that highlights the flexibility of its stem and you are soothed by the rhythmic swaying of a pendulum made of Aplomb suspension lamps by Lucidi e Pevere.

Want to dive deeper into the mind of this talented artist? Don’t miss our exclusive interview.

Tell us a bit about the beginning of your career as an artist. How did you get into digital art and what motivates you to create?

I studied at a school called Hyper Island when I realized that animation was something that I wanted to become really good at. I started out as a 2D animation but then I started to lean into more and more 3D and now I’ve been a 3D animation for the last 7 years.
The feeling when you’re working on something that you think will be good is priceless. That feeling motives me to create, create and create, until I finally create something good.
To sum that up: Creating something good feels good

 

Your looping animations are at the same time delicate and mesmerizing. What is the creative process behind your artworks?

My process is very iterative. I make a lot of quick animation concepts in 3D, then I’ll take a couple of them and make iterations out of them and hopefully something interesting starts to appear. Usually there is a visual problem and a visual solution. If I can find a problem I can create a solution. Solutions are satisfying to look at. There is always an interesting concept behind every problem.

How did you develop your distinct style of portraying surreal situations, exceeding the boundaries of what’s physically possible?

My style have been developed by what I have liked to create. And for every piece I create I realize more what I want to create. Perfect timing rarely exists in the real world so that’s why I’m creating it for my viewers to appreciate and enjoy perfection on repeat, forever.

 

Talking about your sources of inspiration, Your work involves a lot of creativity, looking to reality from a different, original perspective. How do you achieve this?

I draw a lot of inspiration from engineering and mechanics. Then I combine that complexity with simplicity. Then I try to find contractions in the design. Hugging cactus, soft metal or heavy feathers. And during the whole process I’m open to iterate in every possible way and every moment. That usually leads to some creative perspectives.

 

What did inspire you in the project “What’s in a lamp?” with Foscarini?

The Design of the products are amazing, so I only had to find an interesting way to portray their functionality through concept and animation. Great designs are always inspiring for an animator.

 

What is your personal favorite artwork of the series and why?

From an animation perspective I like the Magneto and from an aesthetic perspective I would choose the red Twiggy.

 

What is creativity for you?

Creativity for me is interesting solutions for interesting problems.

Follow the project on the official Instagram channel @foscarinilamps
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Meet Noma Bar, featured artist in our project “What’s in a lamp?”. In his artworks Foscarini’s most iconic lamps are protagonists of minimal yet thoughtful illustrations in which – through a skillful use of “negative space” – multiple levels of interpretation are concealed.

Noma Bar is undoubtedly one of the freshest and most innovative illustrators on the international scene. Of Israeli origin, he lives and works in London and is internationally known for its original style, sitting somewhere at the intersection of illustration, art and graphic design. Few colors, very clear, perfect formal stability and stories hidden in the details: his artworks allows to grasp and appreciate an unusual creative twist as the mind goes where the eye does not guide it. It takes an extra moment of attention, because the glance is not everything and there is something that goes beyond it. It’s all a matter of seeing what others don’t see, of looking where others aren’t.
His work has appeared in many magazines, covers and publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, Internazionale, Wallpaper*, Esquire and The Guardian, only to name a few.

In this series for the project “What’s in a lamp?” – which transforms the Instagram @foscarinilamps feed into a “social-art-gallery” that offers room for well-known and emerging exponents in the world of visual arts, inviting them to get inspired by the Foscarini collection – our most iconic lamps have become characters of Noma’s creative universe. They are protagonists of minimalist images in which – through a skillful use of “negative space” – multiple levels of interpretation are concealed and stories emerge when looking at the details more closely. Artistic expressions of a stunning simplicity, a common trait between the artist’s and Foscarini’s approach: liberate the essential to thrill and catch the eye.

Want to know more about this incredible artist and his collaboration with Foscarini? Enjoy the interview!

Tell us a bit about the beginning of your career as an artist. How did you start? Have you always known, at some level, that’s what you wanted to do?

Becoming an Artist was a childhood dream.
I have drawn since I remember, as a child, I was always drawing, making art and craft.
I used to draw portraits of people around me, family members, neighbors, friends etc.
It was very clear to me that this is what I like and want to do with my mature life.
I went to study Graphic Design and graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2000.
I moved to London straight after graduation, sending out some of my illustrations on postcards to editorials and got my first commission soon after that.

 

How do you describe your work, that stands at the intersection between illustration and graphic design? You once labeled your art “brief illuminations”, can you tell us more about this?

I’m calling my work Graphic Art as it looks graphic but it’s more illustration and art.
While I make my own/personal projects I define them as Art.
And when I’ve been asked to create an artwork for a given brief or story that’s an illustration.
“Brief illuminations” might be the way to distill & simplify complex issues with a simple drawing.

 

In this project Foscarini lamps are part of a series that investigates the role of the lamps in transforming a space into your home. Are there any objects that make you feel at home, wherever you are?

My Dad was a woodsman, and during my childhood, he used to use this postcard as a letter slip.
I always liked this image and the graphic duality of the tree trunk and the child’s legs.
This postcard is on my desk and is definitely making me feel at home.

Talking about your sources of inspiration, you said once “I look where many people don’t look”. How did you begin to see things from a different perspective?

I don’t think this can be one thing,
it’s a life evolution and constant striving to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary.
If I use cooking as a metaphor, it’ll be trying to discover new flavors by using daily and familiar nutrition.
And I can’t explain how it happens.

 

In your artworks, complex ideas result in a stunning simplicity. Foscarini has a similar approach to product design, aiming to liberate the essential and get straight to the heart. What is the creative process behind your straight-to-the-point artworks?

Starting to work on a brief is like entering a sweets shop and picking only one sweet.
This is what I feel when I read my clients’ briefs.
My first thinking will be at Highgate woods (opposite my studio),
sitting in the middle of the woods, reading and sketching brief ideas, and then drawing the best ideas on my computer back in my studio.

 

What is your favorite thing to draw?

That’s an easy question, I always draw people and faces around me.

 

Your work involves a lot of being creative. How do you keep it fresh?

I’m in a constant search for creativity and new ideas.
I walk a lot and spend hours in nature every day, I observe the daily transformation of the wood and the seasons,
every day is similar but different, and I’m looking into this point of difference.

 

What did inspire you in this project with Foscarini? Which is(are) the illustration(s) that you like the most and why?

I know how to appreciate good and timeless silhouettes and luckily I had Foscarini’s great iconic silhouettes to work with.
The brief started with ‘Your Home’, which inspired me to find daily situations inside and outside Home with some uses of light elements together with Foscarini lights that beautifully integrated.

 

Which is(are) the illustration(s) that you like the most and why?

The dog Lumiere is probably my favorite think that it surprises you (as well as myself), to find out how ‘Lumiere’s’ light body can become a nose, the base of the lamp transforms to a dog’s mouth and the light that comes out is the dog’s fur.

 

What is creativity for you?

I’ve been asked to illustrate creativity a few times
Attached an image that is my favorite for this,
an ostrich with his head digging in the sand, a symbol of ignoring,
But at the same time, the ostrich head looks back out, as ‘keep it the business’.
With so much going on with some new trends, I feel like this ostrich, putting my head in the sand and ignoring the speedy visual taste transformations, but actually, the 2nd head of the ostrich that pops back reminds me to stay tuned and keep my aerials out.

Follow the project on the official Instagram channel @foscarinilamps
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Writer, illustrator and tattooist: Luca Font’s visual universe is made up of a range of different media, all with a unique distinctive style. In his series of illustrations created for Foscarini’s “What’s in a lamp?” project, Font visually depicts the role of light and of Foscarini lamps in defining a room and giving it personality.

Luca Font takes part in our latest project “What’s in a lamp?” which transforms the Instagram @foscarinilamps feed into a virtual place that offers room for well-known and emerging exponents in the world of visual arts, inviting them to “play” with Foscarini collection and get inspired by a catalogue of lamps composed by different styles, materials, and designers.

Luca Font, a writer, illustrator and tattooist, was born in Bergamo in 1977. He lives in both Milan and New York, the cradle of Graffiti Art, and his passion for graffiti marks his beginnings as an artist. From trains to walls, tattoos, paper and digital art, Luca Font’s visual universe is made up of a range of different media, all with the same transversal, distinctive style that shows a distinct preference for the abstract, for graphic design and typography. His work features a constant search for visual synthesis, as well as a graphic style that blends minimalism and expressiveness.

In his series of illustrations created for Foscarini, Font visually depicts the role of light and of Foscarini lamps in defining a room and giving it personality, both at night, when the light is turned on, and during the day, when it’s switched off. Six illustrations make up a kind of circadian cycle in which the house develops its own personality through an illusion of pareidolia.

Tell us how your career as an artist began. Where did it all start? Have you always known that you wanted to do this for a living?

I started drawing as a child and focussed on graffiti as a teenager and for many years this was my main creative output. I never had any formal training in art and I’d certainly never thought about making a living out of drawing until, almost by chance, I got the opportunity to learn tattooing, which I grabbed right away. In 2008 I left the world of communication without a second thought and everything changed.

 

Your graphic style is very striking, recognisable and distinctive. How would you describe it and how has it evolved thanks to the experiences you’ve had?

I grew up surrounded first by video game graphics and then by skateboards. My mother taught art history, but I always preferred those powerful, evocative illustrations to altarpieces by Mantegna. This probably contributed to the same graphic approach I developed and have always had, first with graffiti and then with everything else. The goals I always set myself are to be concise, readable and immediately visually striking every time I draw something, whether it’s a palm-sized tattoo or a thirty-metre-long wall, and although I work with many different media, I always try to use a formal language that makes my output coherent.

 

In this project, you explored the role of Foscarini lamps in transforming space by day and night, when they’re turned on and off. Tell us a bit more about the inspiration for this series?

The most interesting part of working with a client is the opportunity to talk and, especially, to listen, which is essential for finding new angles and viewpoints. When I talked to Foscarini, the thing that emerged right away was how important light is to a space: not only nighttime light, which is obviously artificial and produced by lamps, but also light during the day, in which lamps develop a different role as design objects. So light (or rather lights) and Foscarini lamps become two elements that -depending on the time of day – help define the personality of the home in different ways, which is in turn a reflection of the personality of the people who furnish it and live there.

 

Are there objects that make you feel at home, wherever you are?

I’ve been travelling constantly over the last ten years and what makes me feel a bit closer to home every time are the cameras I always take with me. In a way they’re a bridge between where I am and where I’ll go back to, taking a piece of each journey with me.

 

What do you think of Foscarini? How was it working on this project with the company?

I felt in tune right with the company right from the start because its philosophy revolves around individuality and personality, which are the same concepts my work is based on. Each individual piece is a project in itself. I don’t believe in standard solutions because I’m convinced there’s a need to be constantly updating and doing research, both aesthetic and conceptual.

 

What inspires you and how do you develop your creativity?

I have some very varied, often almost random, sources of inspiration. I draw on research but also on everyday life: we’re so used to being surrounded by visual stimuli that we generally don’t pay attention to what we see, but in most cases the best thing to do to find the right idea is to stop drawing and look around while you wander aimlessly.

 

What’s your creative process?

It depends a lot on what I have to do. I often develop ideas by letting them sit in the background while I do something else, then I sketch very rough drafts on paper that I later process digitally and eventually transfer back onto paper or canvas. I work more and more exclusively for digital media, but producing physical artwork is still my favourite.

 

What’s your favourite thing to draw?

Definitely architecture and angular objects.

 

Which illustration, or illustrations, do you like most in this series and why?

In reality I enjoyed not so much doing one illustration, as the fact that I had the opportunity to create a symmetrical series portraying the cycle of day and night with six subjects spread over two lines. Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of any visual work and aesthetics should never be an end in itself.What does creativity mean to you?
I think it’s definitely an organic process that’s impossible to separate from everyday life.

Follow the project on the official Instagram channel @foscarinilamps
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The sculpture-lamp Orbital became the first step in the relationship between Foscarini and Ferruccio Laviani, but it represented also a statement: with Orbital we got away from Murano blown glass for the first time, exploring a way of thinking that has now led to the use of over 20 different technologies.

Were you to narrate your relationship with Foscarini with an adjective, which one would you choose?

I’d choose two: it is a profitable and free collaboration. The first term sounds rather financial, but that is not its only meaning. The fact that almost all the lamps I have designed for Foscarini are still in production is obviously good news for my studio and for the company. But I call it profitable above all because having designed objects people still find appealing after 30 years is an enormous gain for a designer: it confirms that what you are doing has meaning. Then comes the theme of creative freedom. Foscarini has allowed me to move with extreme independence of expression from the product to spaces, without ever setting any limitations. That is truly something rare and precious.

 

In your view, how was it that you arrived at the expressive and creative freedom?

I think it is part of the way of being of the people involved. If a designer wins the company’s trust, Foscarini responds by leaving him total freedom of expression. They know that this is the way to get the best from the cooperation, for both parties. Obviously in the awareness that the work of instinct is then followed by the work of the mind. In my case, Orbital was the initial wager: would a lamp with such a particular aesthetic be a success? Would it stand up to the test of time? The response of the public was affirmative, and from that moment on our partnership has always been based on maximum freedom.

What does this liberty mean for a designer?

It gives you the possibility of probing different facets of the possible. For a person like me, who has never identified with one style or a particular type of taste, but periodically falls in love with avours, atmospheres and decorative aspects that are always different, this freedom is fundamental because it allows me to express myself. I do not have artistic pretences and I am well aware of the fact that what I do is for production: serial objects that have to have a clear function and perform it well. Alongside these rational considerations, however, what excites me in the creative act is desire. The almost irrepressible desire to bring about an object that did not exist: something I would like to have, as a part of my life.

What are these objects you desire, and therefore design, going to be like?

I don’t have an answer in terms of style: I always make different things because I always feel different, and I fill my physical and mental spaces with presences that vary in time and reect these personal landscapes. I am fascinated, however, by everything that creates a bond with people or between people. I always give a character to the things I design: the one that in my view best reects my way of interpreting the spirit of the time. Sometimes of the instant. This is much more true for a lamp, as opposed to a piece of furniture, because a decorative lamp is chosen for an affinity, for what it says to us and about us. It is the start of an ideal dialogue between designer and consumer. If the lamp continues to speak to people over time, even 30 years later, it means the conversation is relevant, and the lamp is still able to say something meaningful.

The event for the thirtieth anniversary of Orbital was also an opportunity to present the new creative project NOTTURNO LAVIANI with an exhibition at Foscarini Spazio Monforte. A photographic series in which Gianluca Vassallo interprets the lamps Laviani has designed for Foscarini in a storytelling that unfolds in fourteen episodes in which the lamps inhabit alien spaces.

Discover more about Notturno Laviani

What do you feel when you see the interpretation Gianluca Vassallo has made of your lamps?

The sensation is that of a circle coming to a close. Because Gianluca narrates his idea of light by using the objects I have designed as subtle but significant presences. Which is the same thing that happens when a person decides to put one of my lamps into their home. Looking at Notturno, then, I feel the same great emotion I feel when someone takes possession of one of my projects, or makes it a part of their existence: the sensation is that beautiful feeling of having done something that has meaning and relevance for others.

 

Which photo represents you best?

Definitely the one of Orbital outside: the yover with the torn circus poster. Because that’s what I’m like: everything and its opposite.

E-Book

30 Years of Orbital
— Foscarini Design stories
Creativity & Freedom

Download the exclusive e-book Foscarini Design stories — 30 years of Orbital and learn more about the collaboration between Foscarini and Laviani.
A fertile interchange, based on elective affinities, extending across three decades as a pathway of mutual growth.

Do you want to take a peek?

There are many ways to celebrate a collaboration that has been lasting for 30 years. We have chosen to do so by fueling the creativity fire: with the gaze of Gianluca Vassallo, artist-photographer, on Ferruccio Laviani’s sculptural lamps.

With Notturno Laviani, Gianluca Vassallo interprets the lamps that Ferruccio Laviani has been designing for Foscarini since 1992. The project is built on an idea of light that the artist imagined while listening to a song: a very Italian light that he featured in its dual intimate and public guise.

Notturno Laviani is a tale organized in episodes. Fourteen shots where lamps inhabit alien spaces: significant environments where the distance between objects and context multiplies meanings. The viewer is thus brought to seek personal interpretations around an imaginary of light that belongs to all of us but that we all see with our personal sensibility.

E-Book

30 Years of Orbital
— Foscarini Design stories
Creativity & Freedom

Download the exclusive e-book Foscarini Design stories — 30 years of Orbital and learn more about the collaboration between Foscarini and Laviani.
A fertile interchange, based on elective affinities, extending across three decades as a pathway of mutual growth.

Do you want to take a peek?

At 2022 Milan Design Week Foscarini Spazio Monforte is transformed into a luxuriant Garden of Eden where new lights are revealed as objects of desire

As part of Fuori Salone 2022 Foscarini’s new products for 2022 are revealed in a fascinating installation designed by Ferruccio Laviani that redesigns and transforms the upper floor of Foscarini Spazio Monforte into a garden of Eden. De-Light Garden – the evocative name chosen for the installation – is an immersive journey in a luxuriant garden where new lights are revealed as unprecedented objects of desire for design lovers: Tonda by Laviani himself and Bridge by Francesco Meda – are the latest innovations. In the words of the designer himself, De-Light Garden plays on the theme of temptation and desire by reinterpreting the scene of Adam and Eve intent on gathering the forbidden fruit:

“Delighting means giving pleasure that’s also visual and tactile. De-light is dedicated to the subtle thread that binds us all in the overwhelming urge to possess something and the temptation we feel in desiring it. And it is precisely the temptation and pleasure that light, in all its forms, gives us that inspired me for the installation at Foscarini Spazio Monforte. When you enter you’re surrounded by the Garden of Eden and you see, as if frozen in time, the scene of Adam and Eve intent on plucking the fruit from the tree of Good and Evil, in a setting that looks like it’s straight out of a Dürer engraving. With this setup I wanted to give the idea that ‘falling into temptation’ every now and again is pleasant and that design and light also become an object of desire”.

FERRUCCIO LAVIANI
/ DESIGNER

The presentation of new products continues on the showroom’s lower floor with NILE by Rodolfo Dordoni and CHIAROSCURA by Alberto and Francesco Meda. These products, while very different and with their own identity, together confirm Foscarini’s consistently pioneering vision and its ability to constantly redefine the rules.

As further proof of Foscarini’s more experimental and innovative spirit, a great deal of space is dedicated to the research that the brand is conducting together with Andrea Anastasio on the theme of ceramics and interaction with light: Battiti.

In the project Battiti light is used not to illuminate but to construct. As if it were a material: it generates effects, underlines forms and invents shadows.

Learn more about Battiti.

There’s a new skyscraper in town: the light. For NYCxDESIGN Festival 2022 Foscarini pays homage to the Big Apple and its unmistakable skyline with the photography project “The City of Light”.

Once again Foscarini chooses the art of photography to narrate its evolution and its products. During Design Week 2022 in New York Foscarini presents “The City of Light”, an original photography project by Gianluca Vassallo and Francesco Mannironi where the protagonist is UpTown, the sculptural floor lamp by Ferruccio Laviani that pays homage – starting with the name – to the most inimitable skyline in the world: that of Manhattan.

A lamp-sculpture, a skyscraper of light with a presence of great impact, Uptown is a composition of three volumes made with plates of tempered, coloured and screen-printed glass, in the primary colours yellow, red and blue, superimposed to generate intense chromatic effects.
An illustration of Foscarini’s experimental approach, Uptown has been interpreted in a totally off-scale version, inserted at some of the most recognizable locations in the city: Greenpoint, Wall Street, Broadway, Midtown….

The photographs reveal the particular identity of Uptown, based on transparency, a red thread that has guided every choice in the design development, like the 45° ground edges that make the meeting of the glass plates imperceptible. That which goes unseen, and seems to be quite absent, has been hidden intentionally: what remains is an impression of simplicity, for an immediate interpretation of an object of great complexity. Striking even when not in use, Uptown becomes an absolute protagonist of spaces when it is turned on. The LED light source with dimmer is concealed in the base: when the lamp is on, the plates are filled with colour, and the light is projected upward. Uptown is a lamp of vivid personality, a case of extraordinary charisma that defines its surroundings with its forceful presence.

After selection for the ADI Design Index 2021, making the project eligible to compete for the Compasso d’Oro Award, an important new chapter begins in the spring of 2022 for VITE (LIVES), the multimedia production by Foscarini, with distribution by Corraini in the world’s finest bookstores starting in May 2022.

Corraini and Foscarini have once again joined forces to distribute VITE (LIVES), a story told in images, videos and words to explore different interpretations of the home, the relationship with light, the link between life in the home and the space outside. The publisher and the decorative lighting brand share in an attitude of experimentation and constant research, as seen in the creation of the book-zine Inventario. Corraini will now also distribute the VITE project by Foscarini in the outstanding bookstores of its network around the world.

VITE is a fascinating publishing initiative with which Foscarini talks about light, starting not with the company’s lamps – the people who design, develop and produce them – but with the individuals who live in the spaces brightened by those lamps.

Presented in 2020 and selected for the ADI Design Index 2021, VITE (LIVES) is a voyage that takes us to cities in the North, South, East and West, inside real lives of real people – guided by artist, photographer and videomaker Gianluca Vassallo and writer Flavio Soriga. In the photo and video series, people are at the centre of the visuals and the narration, allowing viewers the freedom to roam vicariously inside personal spaces, real spaces that are approachable and imperfect. This time, Foscarini no longer looks at carefully controlled environments, “aspirational” images of photographic sets, but rather at homes that are lived in on an everyday basis, and close-ups of the people who dwell in them.

Discover more about VITE and
get your fee digital copy

Go to the VITE section

Plena is named and shaped after the moon, with a light that will simply win you over. A suspension lamp with a unique charm, it plays the starring role of the installation curated by Ferruccio Laviani who plays with light and its reflections.

Make room for light: the Milanese installation best tells the creative register of Plena and the synthesis between shape and function, between performance and poetry which identifies it.
The suspension lamp designed by Eugenio Gargoni and Guillaume Albouy, featuring large dimensions yet with a dynamic and light-weight presence, has double lighting: reflected onto the surface underneath it and diffused up towards the ceiling.

Plena is a cradle containing the light source which, like all that is essential, is concealed from view. Designed to illuminate a room completely while remaining soft and enveloping, it is perfectly placed on top of a table, where it never causes glare.
The fabric – a double special PVC canvas with high light reflectivity, resulting from Foscarini’s unwavering research on materials – is magical: it retains the shape as if it were full, yet it does not require any reinforcements, or muscle, and is a perfectly natural gesture. The image changes depending on the observer’s perspective and its arched silhouette conveys a feeling of levity and flight. Plena looks like a veil about to blow in the wind.

“The set-up dedicated to Plena was inspired by the lamp itself as I observed it, trying to understand it and interpret it. Even through the shape is the most immediate aspect that identifies it, trying to illustrate the quality of its light – and in this, its uniqueness – was my main objective. Just like the moons shines brightest on those nights of the full moon, similarly in Plena the indirect light enhances its design, linking it even more to the term which lends it its name, i.e. Louksna, from the root Leuk: Light or Reflected Light. And it is precisely the story of this ‘Spell’ that I wanted to tell through an understated installation, where I wanted to show the hidden face of the full moon (‘Plena’) through the use of simple circular mirrors that float like other satellites in the empty space. A whim, an almost vain gesture, in admiring oneself and being admired, without ever fully revealing the magical side that distinguishes it”.

FERRUCCIO LAVIANI
/ DESIGNER

Discover more about Plena, suspension lamp designed by Eugenio Gargioni and Guillaume Albouy.

Discover Plena

The Compasso d’Oro Award is the oldest and most authoritative design award in the world. Established in 1954, at the suggestion of Gio Ponti, it aims to highlight the value and quality of Italian design products.

Since 1958, ADI – the Italian Industrial Design Association – has been responsible for organising it, guaranteeing its impartiality and integrity – assigning it on the basis of a pre-selection made by a panel of experts, designers, critics, historians and journalists – with the aim of promoting and recognising the quality and innovation of Italian research, material culture and design.

All the awarded objects are part of the Historical Collection of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award, declared by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage as a national asset “of exceptional artistic and historical interest”.

Over the years, Foscarini has been selected several times by the Permanent Design Observatory – the ADI organisation which, thanks to panels of experts, evaluates Italian production in the various commodities categories – obtaining two Compassi d’Oro and seven Menzioni d’Onore (Honourable Mentions), to testify to the brand’s constant commitment to research, in the proposal of new shapes and meanings, not only in the product, but also in the way it tells its story.

2001: The Compasso d’Oro award goes to Mite and Tite

Discover Mite and Tite

Resulting from more than two years of research, the Mite floor lamp has been produced since 2000. Designed by Marc Sadler, it uses a circular diffuser that is 185 cm high, whose shape widens towards the top, made of glass fabric with a carbon thread wound around it for the black version, or made of Kevlar® for the yellow version.
Research on the material started with the exploration of the possible technologies used in rowing, which is based on the winding of threads around a solid body. This technology is normally used to make fishing rods and oars for competition boats, and has already been used by Marc Sadler to make golf clubs. Foscarini is the absolute first brand to have applied this technique to the lighting sector and has patented its invention. The glass fabric is cut like a garment, wrapped around a mould with a polymerised resin and the thread and subsequently baked in a furnace. This way, the thread creates an original decoration and endows the material with strong characteristics of flexibility and solidity, lightness and hard-wearing resistance and the structure is at the same time a load-bearing and illuminating body.
By bestowing the award to Mite and to the Tite suspension, the jury of the Compasso d’oro-ADI 2001 motivated this decision as follows:

“Technological innovation in the use of a purpose-designed material, easy maintenance and cleaning, lightness and conformation characterise an object of the utmost simplicity and understated design for aesthetic expression in the functional response”.

The Mite and Tite lamps are kept at the ADI Design Museum in Milan and are included in the design collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

2011: Menzione d’onore (Honourable Mention) for the “Infinity” installation

Infinity – a gigantic kaleidoscope designed by Vicente Garcia Jimenez that endlessly multiplied images of the Foscarini collection – welcomed and mesmerised visitors to the Fuorisalone 2009 collateral event, in the premises of Superstudio Più in Milan, involving them in an extraordinary multi-sensory experience made of choreographies of light, with videos by Massimo Gardone and original music by Francesco Morosini. The installation was selected in the ADI Design Index 2010 and awarded in 2011 with a Menzione d’Onore (Honourable Mention) on the occasion of the 22nd Compasso d’Oro, in recognition of Foscarini’s highly innovative communication.

2014: The Compasso d’Oro award goes to the Inventario publishing project

Discover Inventario

A mix between a book and a magazine, Inventario is an editorial project directed by Beppe Finessi, which is sponsored and supported by Foscarini, that explores the best productions of international creativity through a tale of design from a multitude of points of views.
Inventory sheds an enlightened and free light on the design, architecture and art scene. This unique and unmistakable approach has been recognised and rewarded with the ADI Compasso d’Oro in its 13th edition, with this motivation from the jury: “for the ability to summarise culturally elevated topics with lightness, illustrating them with a strong visual identity and quality of the publishing product”.
With the artistic direction of Artemio Croatto/Designwork, edited by Corraini Edizioni, Inventario is available in the best book-shops and bookstores all over the world and can also be purchased on-line.

“Inventario is not about Foscarini because we wanted to come up with a project which was entirely unconstrained and thus completely credible in its freedom of choice. Inventario does however act as the spokesperson for our values, looking ahead attentively and curiously and with the pleasure of experiencing the lands of innovation, in true Foscarini spirit”.

CARLO URBINATI
/ chairman of Foscarini

2014: A deluge of Acknowledgements

The commitment and innovative ability of Foscarini, an experimental and creative laboratory working under the banner of excellence, were acknowledged in the 2014 edition of the Compasso d’Oro with a multitude of accolades. In addition to the Compasso d’Oro awarded to Inventario, on the occasion of the 13th edition of the prestigious award, Foscarini received Menzioni d’Onore (Honourable Mentions) for the Aplomb products (design: Lucidi and Pevere), Behive (design: Werner Aisslinger), Binic (design: Ionna Vautrin), Colibrì (design: Odoardo Fioravanti) and Magneto (design: Giulio Iacchetti).

2020: Menzione d’Onore (Honourable Mention) for Satellight

Discover Satellight

The international jury of the 26th edition of the ADI Compasso d’Oro Award awarded the lamp designed by Eugeni Quitllet the Menzione d’Onore (Honourable Mention). Significant is the innovative use of blown glass and plate glass that makes Satellight a simple object of immense appeal, but also one that is unprecedented and profound in its poetic lightness.
The lamp designed is distinguished by a suspended luminous orb, reminiscent of the moon in the night sky or a sphere of light held by a transparent and impalpable drape. The diffuser, thanks to its satin finish, appears like a textured presence suspended in mid-air, even when the lamp is switched off.

On display at the brand’s New York flagship showroom, Foscarini narrates this human-centric vision by offering a setting to experience the photographic works with accompanying lighting designs.

Discover more about VITE project

VITE represents a change of vision and a shifted perspective for the lighting brand Foscarini – an evolution in the way the company references and visualizes its products. VITE reflects a desire to make people the central focus of the narrative about design. The project discusses light, not from the perspective of the lamp, who designed, developed, and produced it, but from the perspective of those who live with it inside their own spaces, in their homes.

On display at the brand’s New York flagship showroom, Foscarini narrates this human-centric vision by offering a setting to experience the photographic works with accompanying lighting designs.
Products on display include Lumiere by Rodolfo Dordoni, Gregg by Ludovica+Roberto Palomba, MITE Anniversario and Twiggy by Marc Sandler, Plena by Eugenio Gargioni and Guillaume Albouy, Sun – Light of Love by Tord Boontje, Caboche by Patricia Urquiola and Eliana Gerotto, Aplomb by Lucidi Pevere and Spokes by Garcia Cumini.

Visitors are taken through the various scenes, as they are transported inside real homes in Copenhagen, New York, Naples, Shanghai and Venice by Gianluca Vassallo (artist, photographer and videographer) and Flavio Soriga (writer). The central focus of the images is not the products but the human beings, leaving viewers to gaze into and roam around the private spaces of the individuals. Not the seemingly unreachable and highly-stylized homes of typical interior shoots, VITE depicts homes that are lived-in in their everyday settings.
The VITE exhibition highlights Foscarini’s shift in viewpoint towards showcasing their lights in a more intimate, private dimension, in spaces where lamps are inserted in a very natural way as part of the experience of real people in their own homes.

“Every time the door opened into one of the lives I photographed in recent months, I pursued a Sunday some forty years ago, that I guard within me. I looked for the wonder of that particular light that I experienced at the age of six, in a brand new house, with the smell of the fresh paint welcoming us and the noise coming from the floor above us. That was simply the light I imagined shone on the life of the people who lived up there.”

GIANLUCA VASSALLO
/ AUTHOR

The VITE project will be on display from now until May 2022 at the Foscarini Spazio Soho Showroom, the brands New York flagship showroom.
You can also visit the Exhibition from anywhere in the world, 24/7 through our special Virtual Tour.
Go to the Virtual Tour

Featuring colour slides and period images, the photographic project by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini takes us on a journey in time, thanks to a lamp and its light.

“It’s always a matter of intuition”: the photography project created by Massimo Gardone for Foscarini stems from an intuition and takes form through his poetic gaze, thanks to a small lamp with simple, essential lines, inserted in legendary locations and situations.
Black and white fragments wrested from time, with all their fascinating charm, come back to life thanks to a virtual and virtuous overlay of images, using slides to create a sector of colour ignited by a luminous touch: that of Birdie Easy, the lamp created for the contract market, which in the poignant interpretation of the photographer transports scenarios from the past into the present.

“When Foscarini asked me to interpret the locations for the new Birdie lamps, the idea arose of inserting them in historic tableaux, evocative period settings. It was like lighting a fuse. But it was not until I imagined seeing the gaze of Joan Holloway, from the series Mad Men, in the young woman seated on a chair on the tenth floor of the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow, in an image shot in 1966, that I understood how the atmosphere of those precious black and white images could be the right one: our narrative starts here, by utilizing photographs from an exceptional archive of images”.

MASSIMO GARDONE
/ PHOTOGRAPHER

Massimo Gardone’s project thus becomes a sequence of captured moments taken from the historic Bridgeman Images archive, which take us back into New York at the turn of the last century, passing – as the years progress – from the lounge of the Knickerbocker Hotel to the veranda of the Park Avenue Hotel or the lounge of the White Hotel, and then reaching London, in the reading room of the YMCA, a room in the Copley Plaza Hotel of Boston in 1937, all the way to a visit to a suite in the Oriental Hotel of Bangkok, in the 1980s.
On the vintage black and white pictures, a 6×6 slide has been superimposed, to imagine Foscarini products inserted in that same original setting.

“As if by magic, in that little square light fills the scene, colours find their way amidst the greys, the alchemy between analogue and digital suddenly happens. Every image is a film, every image makes us fly, arriving elsewhere”.

MASSIMO GARDONE
/ PHOTOGRAPHER

An intense personality and atmospheres dominated by the colours of autumn distinguish the new outfitting designed by Ferruccio Laviani for Foscarini’s showroom in Milan. This setting brings to mind the mineral world and is the backdrop to a selection of iconic lamps.

Mounds of sand in a coordinated palette of colours embrace and frame iconic decorative design lamps, in a new display designed by Ferruccio Laviani for Foscarini Spazio Monforte.
Mineral nuances trigger atmospheres that come alive in the evening with brilliant luminous effects. An intimate, delicate concept that permeates the upper level and the windows of Foscarini’s Milan showroom.
Foscarini Spazio Monforte thus takes on a new, intense personality that becomes an ideal backdrop for a selection of creations from the Foscarini catalogue. Suspension and table lamps emerge from mounds of coloured sand, resting on opaque white cylindrical volumes.

“Of all the seasons, autumn is probably the most intimate, when nature offers us another image of its beauty, through a totally unusual range of colours. This world and this palette of hues have always attracted me, so they form the leitmotif of this new installation at Foscarini Spazio Monforte. A mineral world, narrated through mounds of sand in various tones, from terracotta to sienna, forming a background and embracing some of the most popular models in the Foscarini catalogue with their intriguing presence, illuminating the hues of a season that suggest aromas of brushwood and moss”.

FERRUCCIO LAVIANI
/ ARCHITECT

The protagonists of the first shop window on Corso Monforte are the colourful, nonchalant Binic lamps by Ionna Vautrin, small table models that establish an immediate rapport thanks to their playful forms and intense hues. They are joined on stage by the Rituals suspension and table lamps by Ludovica + Roberto Palomba, featuring particular workmanship of blown glass with light ripples to create a warm, vibrant glow, displayed near the Buds table models by Rodolfo Dordoni, a refined collection in which blown glass is the absolute accent, accompanied by a transparent base to bring out the pure forms.
Other eye-catchers include the theatrical Big Bang suspension lamp by Vicente Garcia Jimenez and Enrico Franzolini, along with the light, dynamic Plena by Eugenio Gargioni and Guillaume Albouy, a model with particular charm, capable of completely brightening a room while retaining its soft, enveloping image.
Behind these presences, the reference to a mineral world emerges in the delicate chromatic juxtaposition of the Aplomb and Aplomb Large concrete suspension lamps by Lucidi Pevere, two offerings that combine refinement and tactile appeal, projecting a downward beam of light.
The narrative plot is completed by the purity of Gregg and the seductive grace of Gem, both by the Palomba duo, while the Mite floor lamp and the very new Mite Anniversario by Marc Sadler, new entry in 2021 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mite’s Compasso d’Oro award, are featured in the lateral window facing Via Santa Cecilia.

Mite is the lamp that marked the beginning of what has become a long-term collaboration between Foscarini and Marc Sadler: a project that disrupts the usual schemes, indulging in what the designer defines as “unreasonable urges”, an attitude that permits exploration of all the potentialities of a material and a technology.

In 2001 Mite won the Compasso d’Oro ADI – the most authoritative global design prize – together with the suspension version, Tite. Twenty years have passed since then, and we think this event, like the iconic and timeless character of Mite, deserves appropriate celebration. The result is Mite Anniversario, an evolution of the original Mite concept based on ulterior experimentation and variation. In this important occasion, we have interviewed Marc Sadler and had an interesting chat about Mite, Tite, and lighting design.

 

HOW DID THE COLLABORATION WITH FOSCARINI FOR THE MITE LAMP BEGIN?

MS — “I got to know Foscarini in a period when I was living in Venice, and Mite was the first project we developed together. For me, Foscarini was a small company that made glass, a focus that was quite different from what I was doing. One day I met one of the partners by chance, on a vaporetto. Conversing about our work, he told me about a theme that was on his mind at the time. He asked me to think about a project that would have the sense of uncertainty of glass – that handmade aspect that is impossible to control and grants every object its own personality – but could also be industrially produced, in a coordinated vision. We parted with a promise to think about the idea.”

 

WHAT WAS THE MAIN CONCEPT BEHIND THE PROJECT?

MS — “I was going to Taiwan for a project of tennis rackets and golf clubs, for a company that works with fibreglass and carbon fibre. That’s a world in which products are made in large numbers, not just a few specimens. When it is produced, when it comes out of the moulds, the racket is gorgeous; then the workers start to clean it, to finish it, to paint it, covering it with graphic elements, and it gradually loses part of the appeal of the production phase. In the end, you have an object covered with signs that conceal its true structure, and the final product – in my view – is always less interesting than it was in the initial phase. In my work as a designer, I prefer the product in its raw state, prior to the finishing, when it is still a “mythical”, beautiful thing, because the material vibrates. Looking at these pieces against the light, you can see the fibres, and I noticed the way the light passed through the material. I took some samples and brought them to Venice. As soon as I got back I called Foscarini, and told them I was thinking about a way to use this material. Although the fibreglass, made of patches of material, has limits in the uncertainties of its workmanship, I was thinking about an object for industrial production. Proposing it to them was rather risky, because large production quantities would be necessary to justify its use, and the material is not very versatile and adaptable. Nevertheless, if we were able to keep it in that fascinating material state, it would be a great opportunity for application to a lighting project.”

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PHASE?

MS — “We rang a lot of doorbells of suppliers who used the same materials and techniques to produce wine vats or sporting goods, but unfortunately they were not willing to collaborate on this experimental research. But we were not discouraged, and we continued to search until we found an entrepreneur who also worked with this material for his own, personal pursuits (he had built a motorized hang-glider). He was enthusiastic about the project and immediately wanted to cooperate on it. He had a company that produces extraordinary, very special fishing rods, but he decided to take the leap with us into the world of lighting. He sent us trial samples, which he made on his own, asking our opinion on new resins and new threads. Design is made by people who act and interact, together. This is a totally Italian kind of magic. In the rest of the world, companies often wait for the designer to arrive, like a superhero, ready to deliver something that is already done, ready for implementation. But that is not how it works: to make truly innovative projects, there has to be on-going dialogue, a process where problems arise and are solved together. I prefer that way of working.”

 

DID YOU MAKE MODELS AND PROTOTYPES FOR STUDY?

MS — “The first model was made with a traditional closed mould, but then it occurred to us that we could try another technique – “rowing” – based on the wrapping of threads around a full volume. Observing the threads that could be used, I found some bundles that were considered defective, where the thread was not perfectly linear, but seemed a little vibrated. This type of thread became the resource for the final production. The fibres are not all uniform: we wanted to utilize this “defect” which makes each lamp have a unique quality. We wanted to get away from the technical aspect, to bring the value of craftsmanship and a warm sense of material back into play, which is something people know how to do in Italy.” In an initial prototype, I had cut off the top at a 45° angle, inserting a car headlight. If I look at that first prototype again today it bothers me a little, but that’s absolutely normal because it represents the beginning of a long search path. To reach a simple product, a lot of work is required. At first, my sign was too strong, almost violent. Foscarini was very good at mediating it, and that’s just right, that’s what design is all about. It means striking the right balance between the parties on the field to work together on a common endeavour. Only by working with Foscarini, who knows how to treat light, who knows how to add taste to transparencies and warmth to texture, were we successful in making sure the product achieved its proper proportion and authenticity. We managed to get a much cleaner, clear-cut object, so the important thing is the light it produces, the transparency of the body and the vibration that can be seen in its design. Not an object that screams out loud, but rather a gentle element that glides into homes.”

 

WHAT ARE THE SPECIFIC CHALLENGES IN A PROJECT INVOLVING LIGHT?

MS — “After this lamp and after this approach to composite materials, I got back to some extent to the label of the designer who makes lamps with novel materials. This doesn’t bother me, and in fact it is what we love doing, together with Foscarini. So today, if in my research I find something interesting, or something that has not yet been utilized in the world of lighting, Foscarini is the company with which I can have the best chance of developing something original and innovative.”

 

WHAT ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF THE LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY USED IN THIS PROJECT?

MS — “Over the last 20 years, lighting technology has evolved a great deal, and now we use LEDs. With respect to the technology of the past, it is a bit like the difference between electronic injection and a carburettor. You could achieve excellent results with a carburettor, but it took a genius who knew how to listen to motors, and how to tune them by hand. For Mite something similar happened. In the first version we inserted a rather long light bulb, positioned at a certain height. To close the trunk, we shaped a circular chrome-finished metal plate, experimenting with ifferent angles, to reflect the direct light upward but also to make the light go down in the body of the lamp, letting it run over the material, with a back-lighting effect. Obviously that technology created limits of freedom of action, while today with LEDs we can take the luminous effect wherever we want it.”

 

HOW HAS THE WORK OF DESIGNERS CHANGED DURING THESE FIRST TWO DECADES OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM?

MS — “I am happy with my work today because its seems like a return to the 1970s, when the entrepreneur had an important role and expressed clear intentions made of objectives, a schedule, the right budget, and knowing that he had worked well up to that point, wanted to go further, somewhere he had never gone before. Perhaps it is this very arduous moment of the pandemic, perhaps it is because I am starting to get tired of working with large multinational and oriental corporations, but I think the time has come to get back to direct, personal work with entrepreneurs.”

HOW IMPORTANT IS “TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER” IN DESIGN RESEARCH?

MS — “It’s fundamental. My work could be seen in terms of the principle of communicating vessels. I take something from one place, and I ‘pull’ it into another place, to see what happens. I have always done this, for my whole life. In my studio we have a workshop where with my hands I can build or repair anything, and this helps me a lot. It is not the concept of the ‘sky’s the limit’, but I think a lot before saying no to something, because often there are already solutions that exist elsewhere, so it is enough to know how to transfer them.”

 

THIS LAMP IS MADE OF A SELF-SUPPORTING (TECHNOLOGICAL) “WEAVE”: WHAT IDEA IS SHARED BY TEXTILES WITH THE DESIGN OF LIGHTING?

MS — “In Mite the importance of the fabric comes from the advantage of being able to have a weave that vibrates the light when it passes through the body of the lamp, so it was no simple task to find the right fabric. But with the fabric, in its infinite variables, you can always do marvellous things with light, and in fact with Foscarini we are continuing to experiment and to develop new projects.”

 

WHAT DOES THE NAME MITE MEAN, AND ITS SUSPENSION VARIANT, TITE?

MS — “The name comes from a word game in French, which my mother taught me when I was a boy, to help me remember the differencebetween mineral formations in caves, divided into those that grow from the bottom up, the stalagmites, and those that descend from above, the stalactites. Hence the idea for the name. While initially I was thinking about the logic of a form that tapers as it gets further away from the floor or ceiling – so the names of the two lamps had to be reversed – this logic works well for its typological affinities too: the (stalag)MITE rests on thefloor, and the (stalac)TITE hangs from the ceiling.”

It was in 1990 that Foscarini fi rst introduced its blown glass lamp, combined with an aluminium tripod, the result of a collaboration with designer Rodolfo Dordoni who reinterpreted the classic lamp shade in a new light. Its name? Lumiere.

Discover Lumiere

When and how did the Lumiere project begin (the spark, the people involved at the start)?

It began many years ago, so recalling all the people involved calls for an effort of memory that isn’t easy at my age, perhaps. I can tell you about the context, though. It was a period in which I had started working with Foscarini on a sort of corporate overhaul. They had called me in to coordinate things, which could mean a sort of art direction of the new collection, because they wanted to change the company’s approach.
Foscarini was a pseudo-Muranese business, in the sense that its home was Murano, but its mentality was not exclusively rooted there. We began to work on this concept: to conserve the company’s identity (that of its origins, therefore Murano and glass) while differentiating it from the attitudes of the other Murano-based fi rms (i.e. furnaces, blown glass), trying to add technological details to the product to give it character, making Foscarini into a “lighting” company, more than a producer of blown glass. This was the guiding concept for the Foscarini of the future, at the time.

 

Where was Lumiere invented? What led to its form-function (design constraints, the materials: blown glass and aluminium)?

Based on the guideline I have just described, we began to imagine and design products during our meetings. At one of those meetings – I think we were still in the old Murano headquarters – I made a sketch on a piece of paper, a very small drawing, it must have been about 2 x 4 cm: this glass hat with a tripod, just to convey the idea of combining glass and casting, because the casting of aluminium was a very contemporary, new idea at the time. So this little tripod with the casting and the glass wasn’t so much the design of a lamp as a drawing of a more general concept: “how to put together two elements that would represent the characteristics of the company’s future products”. In practice, that was the intuition.

 

One moment you remember more than others in the story of Lumiere (a conversation with the client, testing in the company, the first prototype)?

Well, definetely the moment when Alessandro Vecchiato and Carlo Urbinati showed interest in my sketch, in that intuition. I remember that Sandro took a look at the drawing and said: “That’s nice, we should make it”. The product was immediately glimpsed in that sketch. And I too thought the drawing could become a real product. So Lumiere was born.

 

We live in a society of rapid obsolescence. How does it feel to have designed a success that has continued for 25 years?

Those were truly diff erent times. When you designed something, the considerations of companies were also made in terms of investment, of its amortisation over time. So the things you designed were more extensively thought out. What has changed today is not the companies but the market, the attitude of the consumer, who has become more “mercurial”. Today’s consumer has been infl uenced by other merchandise sectors (i.e. fashion and technology) not to desire “lasting” things. So the expectations companies have regarding products are also defi nitely more short-term. When a product (like Lumiere) has such a long life in terms of sales, it means it is self-suffi cient, a product that wasn’t necessarily paying attention to trends, at the moment. That is precisely what makes it appealing, somehow. It brings pleasure, to the person who buys it and the person who designed it. Personally, I am pleased that Lumiere is a “sign” that is still recognizable, still has appeal: 25 years are a long time!

 

How has this context “made its mark” – if indeed it has – on the skin and mind of Rodolfo Dordoni, man and architect?

I think about two important moments that infl uenced my work. The fi rst is the encounter with Giulio Cappellini, who was my classmate at the university. After graduation, he asked me to work in his company. Thanks to this encounter I was able to learn about the world of design “from the inside”. I worked for 10 years, getting to know about all the aspects of the furniture sector. So my background is that of someone who knows, “in practice”, about the entire chain of design production. This led directly to the second of my important moments. Thanks to this practical experience, this work in the fi eld, when companies turn to me they know that they are not just asking for a product, but also for a line of reasoning. And often this reasoning leads to the construction of relationships with companies that become long discussions, long conversations, which help you to know the company. Knowing the company is a fundamental factor to analyse a project. I like to work – I’m a bit spoiled, in this sense – with people with whom I share similar intentions, similar goals to achieve. Then you have the possibility of growing together.

 

The Nineties:a Google search brings up the Spice Girls, Take That, Jovanotti with “È qui la festa?”, but also “Nevermind” by Nirvana and the track by Underworld in the soundtrack of the fi lm Trainspotting, “Born Slippy”. What comes to mind if you think about your experience of the Nineties?

For me the Nineties were the start of a progressive technological misunderstanding. Meaning that I started to no longer understand everything that happened from the vinyl LP onward, in music, technologically speaking. I often think back on how I criticized my father, when I was a kid, for being technologically backward. Compared to the way I am nowadays, his backwardness was nothing, if I think about my “technological inadequacy” as opposed to my nephews, for example. We might say that the Nineties were the start of my “technological isolation”!

 

What has remained constant for Rodolfo Dordoni the designer?

Drawing. The sketch. The line.

The signature collection “The Light Bulb Series” developed thanks to collaboration between Foscarini and James Wines/SITE is the protagonist of the installation “REVERSE ROOM” presented during Milan Design Week 2018 at Foscarini Spazio Brera: an overturned and angled “black box” that disrupts spatial perception and challenges our reactions to the environment and conventions.

Composed of a number of carefully selected pieces, in numbered limited editions, The Light Bulb Series is a signature collection of great value for the story it tells and the thinking it conveys. It is part of wider-ranging reflections on the light bulb as an archetype, with its typical form dictated by function and by the technology available at the time, which has remained constant for decades, in spite of the fact that technical evolution now makes it possible to adapt any form to the same function.
Wines approaches these considerations through explorations that gravitate around the main themes that have guided his architectural research, based on reaction to the surrounding environment and action on it. These themes are reversal, dissolution, nature, all those states of “architectural defect” that make it possible to rethink reality, giving it form while at the same time dissolving its boundaries.

All the pieces of the series are on view at Foscarini Spazio Brera in the Reverse Room, a special installation created by James Wines with his daughter Susan Wines, designed to bring out the characteristics of surreal inversion of these variations on a theme. In a room with dark walls, overturned and angled, with monochrome tables and chairs, the suspension lamps sprout from the floor, while table lamps look down from the ceiling, challenging our perception of spaces and our response to environmental stimuli and conventions.

“This series comes from the idea of disrupting the classic design of incandescent light bulbs, an idea that suggests a critical reflection on the absolutely non-iconic forms of modern LED lamps. The concept, implemented by Foscarini, stems from research on the spontaneous way people identify with forms and functions of everyday objects. In this case, the light bulbs merge, crack, shatter, burn out, overturning any expectations”.

JAMES WINES
/ ARCHITECT & DESIGNER

The story of the collaboration between Foscarini and James Wines unfolds across a span of nearly 30 years, through several important phases, in a natural merging of respective poetics. Its roots date back to 1991, with Table Light / Wall Light, the first piece made by Foscarini with Wines’ SITE group, created for the cultural areas of the exhibition in Verona “Abitare il Tempo”, curated in that period by Marva Griffin. Some years later, the paths of Foscarini and SITE crossed again, thanks to an extensive profile published in Inventario (the book-zine directed by Beppe Finessi, organised and supported by Foscarini), written by Michele Calzavara with coverage of the group’s many projects. This led to Foscarini’s idea of reviving the first project, transforming it into a collection of editions of lamps and objects.

“For a design-oriented company it is always a privilege to cross paths with the conceptual and artistic evolution of creative talents with whom the firm shares intrinsic affinities. This is what has happened in the case of Foscarini and James Wines.”

CARLO URBINATI
/ PRESIDENT OF FOSCARINI

“The Light Bulb Series” is a signature collection based on reflection on the light bulb as archetype, with its typical rounded form, poetically interpreted in a series of surprising disruptions.

“An idea that suggests a critical reflection on the absolutely non-iconic forms of modern LED lamps”. James Wines approaches this paradigm through explorations that gravitate around the main themes of his architectural research. These themes are inversion, dissolution, nature, all those states of “architectural defect” that allow us to rethink reality, granting it form and dissolving its boundaries at the same time. A drive towards experimentation, towards doing better but also doing differently, that has always been part of the spirit of Foscarini as well.

Composed of a number of carefully selected pieces, in numbered limited editions; The Light Bulb Series includes five different interpretations of this luminous icon. The collection is accompanied by a monograph on the work of the SITE studio, which encourages us to think about a world – of design, and therefore of possibility – in which we can always imagine shedding light in a different way.

/ Black Light
A light bulb socket that emits light, while the bulb remains black and “dark”: a pure inversionof functions and parts.

/ Candle Light
A candle on a light bulb: a short circuit between different ways and effects of shedding light. Two histories of lighting technique, the flame and the tungsten that blend and form a new ambiguous, paradoxical object.

/ Melting Light
As during fusion, a bulb immortalized in a photogram, halfway between form and liquefaction, suspended in a state of transition, becomes the evanescent icon of a ghost.

/ Plant Light
A bulb invaded by nature, pebbles and earth, can vanish as a bulb and be transformed as a terrarium, or in a bulb-pot for the plant that colonizes it.

/ White Light
The matrix, still intact, the basic icon and archetype of enlightenment.

All the pieces of the series are exhibited in the REVERSE ROOM, a special installation created by James Wines with his daughter Suzan Wines, designed to bring out the characteristics of surreal inversion of these variations on a theme.

Discover more about the Reverse Room installation

On the occasion of the 2017 edition of Brera Design Days, Foscarini is presenting an installation of MAESTRIE, an extensive project which sheds light on the craftsmanship skills at the heart of the production of some of Foscarini’s iconic products.

At Foscarini Spazio Brera, a large installation designed by Peter Bottazzi – set designer and multi-purpose designer, who has previously partnered up with directors such as Peter Greenaway, Moni Ovadia and Robert Wilson and curator of exhibition set-ups for Steve Mc Curry – with pictures and videos by Gianluca Vassallo aims at recreating in an emotionally-involving way the know-how and craftsmanship work behind some of the brand’s iconic models.

“I tried to unravel and stratify materials, pictures, motion, lights, projections, products and noises, laying out thousands of stimuli in a far from orthodox choreography”

PETER BOTTAZZI
/ SET AND PROJECT DESIGNER

A large structure measuring 12 metres in length is set to invade the Foscarini Spazio Brera to share suggestions and fragments of truth through pictures of the faces and hands of craftsmen who give rise to ideas and designs, through their work. The photographs were taken by Gianluca Vassallo inside the small craft-based businesses where lamps such as Mite and Twiggy by Marc Sadler, Aplomb by Lucidi and Pevere, Rituals and Tartan by Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, and Lumiere by Rodolfo Dordoni are put together.

Visitors are welcomed by a maxi-screen on which suggestive pictures of the manufacturing process are shown, a mass of stimuli and precious titbits of know-how, in a tale that is at the same time the stage setting and the ritual process to celebrate the wisdom and skill of craftsmen’s hands. The photographer Gianluca Vassallobecame our spokesperson and vehicle, delving into the forges and lobbies packed with life and warmth, amid hands and materials, pots and toils, to illustrate to us how heavy and tiresome the path leading to the transformation and realisation of an idea always is.

“MAESTRIE highlights the craftsmanship skills which lead to so many extraordinary objects of Italian design, and some of our most popular lamps, which make up an essential part of Foscarini’s DNA. For many years, we focused on the end product, on the styling and emotional impact that it could have, while neglecting however ‘HOW’ this result was obtained. I wanted to find a way to convey the emotions I feel every time I visit the craftsmen who actually make our lamps. I am always fascinated by the extraordinary things that can be done and by the fact that often people forget how attractive and important they are”.

CARLO URBINATI
/ FOSCARINI PRESIDENT

Maestrie is a wide-ranging project focusing on a previously hidden dimension: the crafts know-how that lies behind the making of some of Foscarini’s most iconic models.

Discover Maestrie

To transmit brand values and, above all, the settings, atmospheres and suggestions that it wants to create through its lamps, Foscarini has presented a video-installation with a strongly emotive impact, at Fuori Salone 2007. Here is the scene as described by its creators, Vittorio Locatelli and Carlo Ninchi.

/ Etna. Exterior. Dawn

From darkness to light.
A landscape of black earth and lava in the bare, colourless, primordial dawn. There is an apparent calm and sense of peace. The silence is broken only by the wind and the birds. But the landscape still smokes; we can feel it boiling at its core. The moving earth breathes. Light grows and clearly separates the white of the air from the black of the land. This is an ancient landscape of memory and dreams. An inner landscape in silent movement.
A figure appears with the landscape. Not in it, but besides it. She is thinking of it, or maybe dreaming of it or remembering it. It is a crude figure, just like the landscape, with the whitest skin and the blackest hair. Oriental, beautiful and cold, with narrow eyes hiding thoughts and emotions.
Memories are born that we can guess at, but not understand. They tell of fragments of history whose theme is light and space.

/ Hong Kong, Man Mo Temple, Interior, Evening

Days gone by. A Buddhist temple whose ceiling is covered by smoking votive spirals. The light is fragmented in an atmospheric dust of vapours. The space is indefinite, mobile and kaleidoscopic, with concentric, spiral movement. A light of the spirit.

/ Catania, Palazzo Biscari, Interior, Day

Another history that interlinks with the one above. Another space and another light. A Baroque palace encrusted with sensual, voluptuous decorations as only Sicilian palazzi can be. It has a touch of the decadent, excessive and yet also magnificent. Here the light is fragmented by gigantic chandeliers in Venetian glass, amplified by mirrors and dissolved in the stucco and furnishings.
The music is sweet, romantic and tugs at the heart strings, like the music enjoyed by young people today – raucous, dirty and discordant. A troubled yet serene song. It speaks of the earth, but is made up of fragments of broken memories. It grows, unstable, with the dizzying spaces and then, unexpectedly, it returns clear and serene, while the figure identifies and superimposes with the landscape. The figure is the landscape. The circle closes.

/ Etna. Exterior. Day

When the landscape/figure explodes slowly and sweetly, it is not the volcano that launches lapilli into the air, but it is the image itself that shatters and slowly disintegrates. It flies into the empty space in a long, suspended period of time.
Before and after, in the real space of the projection, there are material, organic lamps that pulse with intermittent light. Before being objects of design and tools for illumination, they are primordial bodies that give the light form, spectators of the cyclic construction and destruction that occurs all around them. They are stable, silent witness and bringers of light in this dizzying landscape.

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