Eclisse by Vico Magistretti for Artemide, 1960s

Learn More About Vico Magistretti

Architect and industrial designer Ludovico ‘Vico’ Magistretti was born in Milan in 1920. After graduating from the Faculty of Architecture at the Royal Polytechnic in Milan in 1945, he immediately began his career working for his father’s small architectural firm. Magistretti notably took part in the ninth (1955) and tenth (1956) editions of the prestigious Triennials in Milan, where he won the Gold Medal and Grand Prix respectively. As a young architect in the 1950s, Vico Magistretti was brimming with new ideas and proposals, which saw him rise to the status of one of the most brilliant exponents of the “third generation.” During this period Vico Magistretti worked for such companies as Artemide , Cassina, De Padova, Flou, Fritz Hansen , Kartell and Schiffini.

Vico Magistretti’s best known pieces

Magistretti’s skill as a designer blossomed in the 1950s, when he moved into the field of mass-produced furniture and lamps. Working with craftsmen and entrepreneurs who had long produced furniture in areas north of Milan, Vico Magistretti’s first great success came in the form of the internationally acclaimed Carimate chair (1960) produced by the Cassina company. Designed for a golf club he was working on that same year, the Carimate chair combined rural simplicity with urban sophistication. The bright pop of red mixed with the smooth lines of the wooden supports further contribute to the chair’s worldwide success. Magistretti’s style oozed simplicity and elegance, and his pieces concealed the complexities of production. His world famous Eclisse lamp (1967) could ‘eclipse’ the light source and the lamp itself, by moving the rotating inner shades of the structure.

Vico Magistretti’s legacy

Vico Magistretti won numerous awards across the globe for his design classics, including the Compasso d’Oro award in 1967 for the Eclisse lamp. Magistretti’s designs can be seen in museums and galleries around the world, including twelve of his projects in the permanent design collection of MoMA, New York. After Magistretti passed away in September 2006, his studio was converted into a museum devoted to the study of his work.

Legendary Italian lighting manufacturer Artemide was founded in the Milan area in 1959 by engineer-designer Ernesto Gismondi (born in San Remo, 1931) and designer Sergio Mazza (born in Milan, 1931). Notably, the latter designed the company’s first successful product, the Alfa Lamp, a year prior to Artemide’s launch. Both founders went on to contribute designs to Artemide’s ever-evolving lines over the next several decades, alongside spearheading the company’s mission to develop distinctive, architecturally-driven lamps, pendants, and other fixtures in collaboration with major design talents from around the world.

Highlights from Artemide’s vast catalogue include Italian designer Vico Magistretti’s space-age Eclisse Lamp (1967) and German-Italian designer Richard Sapper’s minimal, halogen-lit Tizio Desk Lamp (1972), which has become one of the most popular workspace accessories ever produced. The 1980s saw the launch of the Tolomeo Lamp (1987), designed by Italians Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina, which quickly became an international symbol of the “Made in Italy” style that dominated design tastes at the end of the last century. Today, Artemide continues to commission high-tech, high-concept works—increasingly with a focus on sustainability—from notable international designers, such as Herzog & De Meuron, Naoto Fukasawa, Karim Rashid, and Zaha Hadid, among others. Through the decades, many of Artemide’s lighting designs have been awarded the prestigious Compasso d’Oro, with the company itself receiving a “Career Achievement” award in 1995

For more than 50 years, Artemide’s approach has set the pace for design innovation with well-researched products that often end up in the pages of design history books. Numerous pieces have been acquisitioned into museum collections around the world, from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica in Milan, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.