Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2013: London designer Michael Anastassiades presented lamps strung between walls on fine cables for Italian lighting brand Flos last week.

The String Lights by Michael Anastassiades for Flos resemble infrastructure like telegraph wires or European street lighting, with the thin black electrical cord drawing geometric shapes in the air.

These flexes are hung with black conical or spherical pendants, fitted with LED light sources.

Flos also presented Konstantin Grcic’s reworking of the iconic Parentesi lamp by Achille Castiglioni at Euroluce, which took place alongside the Salone Internazionale del Mobile from 9 to 14 April.

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Here’s some more information from Flos:

“Every time I take the train, I sit by the window and watch the series of perfectly parallel strings connecting the pylons, as we move at high speed. I love the way they divide the landscape and how spheres are occasionally beaded through the wires at random intervals. I also love how, in Mediterranean cultures, strings of lights are stretched between posts to mark an outdoor space for an evening party in a village square. And finally, I love how human ingenuity works around problems created by everyday things in the house (like switches and power points) that others have chosen to position where we don’t want them.”

This is how Michael Anastassiades, a Cypriot designer based in London and born in 1967, describes the principle that inspired the String Lights ceiling lamp: a black electric wire that sets up a relationship with the architecture of a space, precisely becoming part of the lines formed by the walls of a room. And stretched out along these lines are two different light sources: one in the shape of an isosceles triangle, the other in the form of a sphere.

A system of tensors gives volume and three-dimensionality to the form outlined by this lightweight cord that plays with space, while the two LED lamps emit a warm light.

Minimal and poetic like a pencil line drawn in the air, String Lights is an original suspension, both conceptually simple and bold at the same time. Anastassiades has always sought the primordial and original essence of forms and materials.

His designs move towards abstraction, in a search for purity that pursues an exercise of stripping away, taking objects and materials back their original dimension of bareness.

“My work springs from an idea of subtraction. Because a naked object brought back to its bare essentiality is the ultimate, definitive expression of beauty.” His is a deceptive simplicity, giving rise to objects imbued with unexpected vitality, and displaying the highest quality craftsmanship.

The post String Lights by Michael Anastassiades
for Flos appeared first on Dezeen.

Peruse a half-century of innovative lighting with the Italian brand’s retrospective iPad app

In its 50-year tenure Flos has truly embodied the spirit of Italian design, serving as a laboratory of experimentation for designers such as Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Achille Castiglioni, Antonio Citterio, Paul Cocksedge, Rodolfo Dordoni, Ron Gilad, Konstantin Grcic, Piero Lissoni, Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson, Tobia Scarpa, Philippe Starck, Patricia Urquiola and Marcel Wanders, just to name a few. Entrepreneurs Dino Gavina, Arturo Eiseinkeil and Cesare Cassina established the brand in 1962 based on the simple values of talent, art and culture, and in 1964 Flos— meaning “flower” in Latin—moved to the Brescia area under the guidance of Sergio Gandini, the visionary who brought in legendary talents like Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Tobia Scarpa.

Gandini thus began the brand’s remarkable story of passion, hard work and a near obsessive devotion to experimentation, research and innovation—all of which has been diligently documented in the Flos Historical Archive by Gandini’s wife and the 2011 Compasso d’Oro winner Piera Pezzolo Gandini. With the help of a team of professionals and friends, for the last six years Pezzolo Gandini has undertaken meticulous research, restoration and classification work to bring together prototypes, designs, original drawings, packaging, graphics, advertising, photographs, film clips, books, catalogues, awards and appearances at trade fairs, exhibitions and museums. The archive takes various forms—multimedia, paper and collections of products and objects.

In order to celebrate this important anniversary, Flos is launching an iPad application developed by Mobile Dream Studio. We recently had the chance to preview the app in Milan, and it is not simply a catalogue, but a true journey in the history of design. Sergio and Piera’s son, Piero, the CEO of Flos, collaborated with writer and journalist Stefano Casciani and photographer Ramak Fazel to create a real family history focused on “precision, project and poetry”.

The app—available late April 2012—offers a detailed chronological sequence of facts, full of archived images of the people who started the company, as well as sketches, prototypes, games, products and videos of the production processes.

Additionally, a number of Flos’ past and present designers sent the company personal love letters which are presented inside the app in the form of the original document, expressing emotions, memories, gratitude and best wishes for the past 50 years and those to come.

To mark the 50th anniversary Flos is also presenting a futuristic product to begin the next 50 years. The Light Photon lamp, designed by Philippe Stark and using OLED technology, produces light on one side and reflects it on the other, thanks to a mirror-effect metalized head. The base is a single block of stainless steel with an optical sensor that powers on and dims the light. Available from September 2012, this limited edition of 500 pieces will carry a special Flos 50 logo sensor meant as a link between the history and the future of the company.