Next Big Thing

A lamp shade these days can be a phantasmagoric experience. Cosmic Angel, Ross Lovegrove’s newest creation for the Italian lighting manufacturer Artemide, projects light over a metallic, tessellated skin like that of a large, amorphous sea creature. The color of the skin shifts as dichromatic systems transform the embedded LEDs on a preprogrammed sequence. “When they change color, it blows your mind,” Lovegrove recently said over the phone from London, shortly before Artemide was to unveil eight variations of the new design in Milan. “It’s really something from nothing. They’re these floating, ethereal things—they almost look like digital manta rays floating in the air.”

This year Artemide celebrates a half century in business, fifty years that have seen lighting design transformed from a pedestrian process of illuminating space with incandescent and fluorescent lamps to a technical craft involving microprocessors, LEDs, and energy ratings. Founded in 1959 by Ernesto Gismondi, an aeronautical engineer, and Sergio Mazza, Artemide has staked out a dis­tinctive identity as a technology-forward firm that makes high-end precision lighting. It’s best known for the classic Tizio, Richard Sapper’s finely balanced black desk lamp from 1972. But if its early designers were the architect-idealists who fill textbooks—Achille Castiglioni, Vico Mag­is­tretti, Gio Ponti, Gae Aulenti, Enzo Mari, Sapper, and Gismondi himself—Artemide now employs the celebrity brand names of product design: Karim Rashid, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Mario Botta, Zaha Hadid, and Lovegrove, who even comes with a nickname: Captain Organic.

Lovegrove’s new series of digital light fixtures, which come in floor and wall- and ceiling-mounted versions, is produced in a high-tech data exchange between the designer’s London office and Art­em­ide’s headquarters in Pregnana, Italy. The amorphous forms are developed from computer algorithms and exported to a milling machine at Art­em­ide, where they are thermoformed and given an array of finishes. “Part of my job is to educate technical staff to think a new way,” Lovegrove says. “I deliver very high levels of data, which is why my work looks the way it does. Working with Artemide is interesting because they never ever worked that way with anybody. We 3-D–print, we mill, we do what contemporary architects like Greg Lynn and Zaha Hadid do and work through the process.”

By contrast, Magistretti’s most famous light for Artemide, Eclisse, introduced in 1965 and still manufactured today, was a more impromptu affair. “Is it or is it not a burglar’s torch?” Magistretti said in Domus shortly before his death. “All of the Italian designs could be conveyed in words … without the need to draw them, just by describing them. Italian design is pure concept.” He explained to the magazine how he expressed the lamp’s design without ever sketching it. “I phoned him—‘Gismondi, take a hemisphere, cut away just over half of it and put this so that it rotates on top of a round half; put a bulb in and turn it so that you have a very powerful light; you direct it and you can also close it.’”

Fifty years have substantially changed the way designers talk about their work. At the 2005 TED conference, Lovegrove delivered a 20-minute visual fanfare of spinning, revolving, liquid, and bony-looking forms accompanied by a kind of techno-organic superpatter. Drawing comparisons between himself and Henry Moore and Leonardo da Vinci, Lovegrove described his work as “DNA—Design/Nature/Art.” He went on, “What nature does is, it drills holes in things, it liberates form, it takes away anything extraneous. That’s what I do. I make organic things which are essential.” Using new processes, materials, and digital-production methods, Lovegrove aims for a level of “fat-free design” to rival Mother Nature’s. He likened a plastic water bottle for Tˆy Nant to “putting a skin on water itself.” The interlocking parts of the all-magnesium Go chair for Bernhardt Design resemble “bone structures—any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as an art object.” He added, “It’s a beautiful way of working, a godly way of working.”

Back in 1959, designers weren’t quite so godly. Even with Italy’s “economic miracle” in full swing, with exports of Vespas, Fiats, modular furniture, shoes, glass, and stainless-steel tableware boosting the country’s wealth, Italian designers were not brand names but humbly ingenious architects used to making the best of limited resources. Mag­istretti, whom Gismondi commissioned in 1961 to design a light, was best known at the time for redesigning a country chair in red-painted wood and a straw seat because his client couldn’t afford Danish furnishings. (It became the legendary Carimate chair).

Lovegrove says that today’s frequent-flier, “high-definition” design practice places a greater economic burden and responsibility on the designer. “In the old days of Magistretti and Castiglioni, the classical model—cigarette in mouth, pencil in hand, thumb on bicycle—you’d cycle to your client, have a nice chat, do a few sketches; the artisan takes it on, builds your prototype, and off you jolly well go,” he says. “Nobody had to buy a hand­ful of computers, invest in any software, invest in people to use that software, and deliver high-technology information.”

Gismondi, however, offers the contrasting argument that the strength of a design is not in the definition of the files or the complexity of the process but in the honesty of the idea. He describes the company’s best-selling Tolomeo, designed by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina, as an “honest lamp.” In his 2004 monograph, De Lucchi noted the simplicity of Gismondi’s idea-driven outlook: “Working for Artemide means establishing a relationship with Gismondi,” he said. “He respects ideas.”

Artemide’s history is as much a history of ideas as it is of technological developments. In 1981 Gis­mondi surprised colleagues when he gave financial backing to Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis venture. As a provocative challenge to the sterility of the International Style and received notions of good taste, the gaudy colors, patterns, and experimental forms of Memphis represented a seemingly childish disruption of everything Artemide represented. In hindsight, it is much easier to recognize how products like Tolomeo were indebted to the playfulness of the Memphis experiments that Gismondi participated in. Inspired by a fish­erman hoisting up a net slung from a pole on a pulley system, De Lucchi set out to make a desk lamp modeled on Luxo’s famed architect’s light but with the springs concealed and partly replaced by a thin exterior wire. If Luxo revealed and cele­brated its mechanism, Tolomeo playfully concealed the workings of its tensile structure, allowing the human-machine interface to drive the design. The lamp’s large swiveling “hat,” which turns on the axis of the bulb fitting, allows the user to shape the pool of light and turns the top into a cooling vent. Fassina, Artemide’s technical director of research, is cocredited with the design, a testament to the extensive development undertaken at the company’s headquarters.

Clearly, with ideas as the company’s currency, Gismondi exerts his power to devalue them. “He’s democratic as long as it’s his decision,” Lovegrove says. “Gismondi is also a designer, and he doesn’t like lamps that he could have designed himself,” says De Lucchi, who started his own company of limited editions in response to Gismondi’s critiques. “The company, Produzione Privata, was partly set up so I could produce the designs Artem­ide turned down.”

But Italy is a country that considers its intellectuals, poets, and designers to be a prestigious and central part of its cultural identity. Artemide has shown broad support for academic research and critical questioning in pursuit of new ideas. Since the mid-1990s, the company has supported ambitious research undertaken at Milan’s universities. Carlotta de Bevilacqua, Artemide’s CEO of brand strategy and research until 2004, is also a full-time professor of lighting design at the Poli­tecnico di Milano. With anthropologists, psychologists, and medical experts, she led decadelong investigations into the relationship between well-being and light sources. The effort led to the Meta­morfosi line of computer-controlled lighting. More recently, Artemide-backed research has focused on white light, spawning products exploiting the effects of subtle shifts in white light achieved with microprocessors and fluorescents.

Corporate faith in design research, so alien to the United States, arguably goes back to the idealism of Italian design immediately after World War II. As the historian Penny Sparke has noted, Italian design emerged from the ashes of the war to follow America’s consumerist model, with U.S. encouragement and the help of Marshall Plan funding, but was pulled in the other direction by what architects such as Ernesto Rogers saw as design’s social duty. “It is a question of building a society,” he wrote in 1946 in Domus. Calling for broad-based reconstruction, “from a spoon to a city,” Rogers argued for “la casa umana,” which placed human welfare and the continuity of the family at the center of things. Gismondi’s longstanding and almost poetic philosophy of “hu-man light”—which promotes the well-being of people—reveals the same humanist faith.

In a more frenetic, technological, and fractured age, this faith can seem quaint. But while many manufacturers choose to slash their research-and-development operations during tough economic times, Artemide is stubbornly staying the course. Six percent of its annual revenue goes back into R&D, according to Gismondi. (In 2008 revenue was $26.8 million.) “Research is difficult to justify, but it’s important,” Gismondi says. “We are famous for this, not only for design.” The company currently runs two research centers, one at its headquarters in Italy and another in Saint-Florent-sur-Cher, France. The firm recently ac­quired a company specializing in LED technology, bringing its holdings to 17 subsidiary and affiliated companies.

It is easier to see Artemide’s research and Love­grove’s distinctive brand of techno-biomorphic hyperbole as elaborate forms of cultural capital, adding status to manufactured objects in order to sell more of them at higher prices. But even on this bluntly materialistic level, Artemide’s approach to developing new ideas, technologies, and manufacturing processes seems remarkably in tune with notions of energy saving and durability. “People are aiming for the cheap solution or the quality solution, and we are the quality solution,” its U.S.-based CEO, Jan Vingerhoets, says. “It will still look good in ten years’ time, still be working in ten years’ time. There’s nothing as green as that.”

Gismondi summarizes his recession strategy with the deft wisdom of a seasoned industrialist: “When you have a crisis, the only solution to survival is to be innovative.” Having lived through Italy’s turbulent postwar economy and nurtured a few design celebrities, he should know something about survival.