Italy Makes Light Right

Italy is to contemporary lighting design as Detroit is to cars. While no country can claim total dominance of the field, Italy has long been at the forefront of lighting innovation. After World War II the country transformed itself from a sleepy, mostly agrarian culture into a powerhouse of design manufacturing, thanks to a core group of men and women who almost single-handedly shaped the direction of contemporary consumer products. “The emergence of Italy during the last decade as the dominant force in consumer product design has influenced the work of every other European country and now is having its effect in the United States,” wrote curator Emilio Ambasz in his introduction to the catalogue to Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, a groundbreaking show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1972. This was especially true for lighting, with companies like FLOS and Artemide leading the way. With the establishment of Euroluce, a major lighting trade fair in 1976, Italy became the global lighting marketplace.

Since then the major players have kept pushing the envelope, from incandescent to halogen to LED, whose potential seems boundless; and OLED fixtures loom on the horizon. The secret to Italy’s prominence is the passion of its individual manufacturers as champions of technological exploration and innovation. “Design has little meaning if there is no substance,” Ernesto Gismondi, founder and CEO of Artemide, has said. “It is only in-house technology which sets you apart from the rest.”