Since launching the Volta collection, we’ve made many references to Vico Magistretti, whose career-long obsession with the simple hemisphere became a kind of touchstone while we designed our own series of iterations of the dome.
‘Look at usual things with unusual eyes.’ – Vico Magistretti
Magistretti’s unwavering design ethos was driven by the belief in the beauty always to be found in simplicity; he used to tell his students that if you’re clear and direct enough about your work, you should be able to explain it over the phone, with no need for visuals. His quote, ‘look at usual things with unusual eyes’ was echoing in our minds during the process of making the Volta collection. Here we take a closer look at a few of Magistretti’s most iconic dome designs, and what makes him such a Palefire favourite.
The Sonora
One of the best-known examples of Magistretti’s dome obsession, the Sonora suspension lamp is often pictured hanging low over a table like a majestic, oversized half moon. Typically, its cable is barely visible, which magnifies the floating, celestial feel. With the Sonora, Magistretti was able to fully realise his ongoing preoccupation with the geometrical purity of the sphere, and since its first version in 1976, in painted aluminium, Oluce has produced iterations in Murano, opaline, gold leaf, and for its 40th anniversary, bronze and 'craquelé ice' (a cracked glass effect).
The Atollo
First made in 1977, the revolutionary Atollo became a kind of blueprint for the late 20th century table or bedside lamp, spawning many copies and homages. Made solely from spherical components – dome, cylinder, and cone – the Atollo has become ‘timeless’ in the truest sense of the word, in that it seems no longer attached to any given design period. Magistretti’s quote that ‘to be truly contemporary, one must always have a hand in the past and a hand in the future’ seems especially apt for the dome shape in lighting, which retains both an ancient and progressive feel.
The Eclisse
The Space Age buzz of the 1960s fed into Magistretti’s creation of the Eclisse in 1965. Now a certified icon, and a fixture in many permanent collections of design museums round the world, the Eclisse was a forward-thinking, technical feat of form and utility. Still a part of Artemide's catalogue, the Eclisse has a uniquely adjustable light source, via a rotating inner shade that is able to ‘eclipse’ the bulb so that light can be diffuse or direct.
'To be truly contemporary, one must always have a hand in the past and a hand in the future.’ – Vico Magistretti
