Not many things that were first made in 1962 and are still in production today can be regarded as being ‘contemporary’. To be contemporary isn’t the same as being ‘modern’, which is now a category of design that has taken on the flavour of a particular historical moment closely associated with the foundation of New York’s Museum of ‘Modern’ Art in 1929. Nor is it about being ‘timeless’, a characteristic which achieves longevity through the adoption of an impersonal variety of neutrality.
Flos manufactures designs conceived a lifetime ago that still feel as relevant and as contemporary as the IC lamp designed by Michael Anastassiades that the company put into production as recently as 2014. What connects them is that they are not afraid to show a sense of personality. Flos looks for new voices from another generation to ensure that it remains closely associated with the idea of the contemporary, rather than turning the brand into a museum of the recent past.
In the same year that Flos launched Arco, Taccia and Toio, three of Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s most memorable lamps as the heart of its first lighting collection, Italy’s most ubiquitous car was the curvaceous Fiat Cinquecento. And Brionvega introduced the Doney Europe’s first all-transistor black and white portable tv. All of them are brilliantly inventive reflections of Italy’s creative industrial culture and have a lot to say about the history of design in general and of 1962 in particular. But of them all, only the three Castiglioni designed lights remain in production today. The car was the work of the gifted engineer Dante Giacosa and an economical means of transport for the masses. But now seems very much a product of another time. The tv still looks modern, though its technology has been redundant for decades. The three lights possess another quality; they still seem contemporary and so remain relevant. The dizzying pace of technological and social change that has overtaken the industrial world has meant that not many objects now last longer than a few years and that makes those few that do survive all the more significant. Pier Giacomo Castiglioni died in 1968, but his brother Achille would go on to work with Flos for many years.
It was the minimalist Dan Flavin who began making art from standard fluorescent lighting tubes eight feet long in “any commercially available colour” as he put it, in the 1960s who drew a distinction between what he called ‘image’ and ‘object’. For Flavin the image of his work was the effect of the light when it was on. The object is the apparatus that produced it. The lights made by Flos come close to Flavin’s understanding of the possibilities of the form in a context outside the gallery and the museum.
Flos’s products reflect a wide range of design languages. There is the sophisticated, knowing wit of Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni who used ready-made components, including a fishing rod, a hand-saw, a transformer and a car headlamp to create the Toio floor lamp in much the same spirit that Marcel Duchamp repurposed a urinal. But there is also the formal purity of Tobia Scarpa’s Biagio designed in 1968 and the laconic sensibility of Jasper Morrison’s Glo-Ball from the 1990s.
Flos was born in 1962, the outcome of a series of earlier experiments with Cocoon, a manufacturing technique which depended on spraying a plastic material over a substructure that had recently become available in Italy. The Cocoon technology made possible the Castiglioni brothers’ lamps named for obvious reasons as Taraxacum and Gatto; respectively the Italian words for ‘dandelion’ and ‘cat’, as well as Viscontea. Flos’s founders, Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina, two of the key figures in post-war Italian design, did not limit the company to making light fittings from a material as synthetic as plastic. Taccia still relies on the traditional skills of Venetian craftsmen to blow the glass diffusor that sits on top of a fluted cast aluminium base designed to dissipate heat from the original incandescent light source. The swooping chromed structure of Arco is anchored in a block of polished white Carrara marble.
In 1967, Flos launched Snoopy, the Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s tribute in marble and enamelled steel to Charles M. Schultz’s cartoon strip anthropomorphic beagle.
Flos went on to take over the production of some of the Castiglioni brothers’ earlier work, notably the Luminator, designed in 1955. In 1972 Flos acquired Arteluce’s catalogue, a company established by Gino Sarfatti, a brilliant engineer and entrepreneur. Sarfatti himself designed more than 600 pieces for Arteluce. Most of them were never intended for large volume production, but some of his highly refined work is still available from Flos. Unlike the whimsical names that Castiglioni gave his work, Sarfatti had the rationalist discipline of an engineer. His lamps have numbers, not names. The 2097 now made by Flos belongs to the 2000 sequence, designated for chandeliers. The 1000 series was reserved for floor lamps, and the 3000 for ceiling lights.
To be contemporary is to be ready to adapt to changing circumstances.
In the last decade, the pace of change in lighting technology has accelerated with the eclipse of traditional incandescent light sources mandated by European Union legislation.
Flos has found ways to equip designs from the 1960s with new light sources. Light Emitting Diodes are more efficient, and emit less heat, but the fact that they can be accommodated in the forms devised for other technologies reflects the continuing relevance of those designs.
In their essence, they remain contemporary. And even more important, Flos has gone on to find new designers who have their own version of the quality of the contemporary, to work with, to make lights that bring our worlds to life.
