PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
Official website artemide.comAdvertisement
Artemide is one of the companies that symbolise the Italian design lamp. Some of its models, like the Tizio and the Tolomeo, are so common in studios and on desks all over the world that many people know them without knowing who makes them.
An aeronautical engineer
The company was founded in 1959 in Milan by Ernesto Gismondi and the architect Sergio Mazza. Gismondi, born in Sanremo in 1931, was an aeronautical engineer specialising in rocket engines, who also taught for twenty years at the Politecnico di Milano. His technical background gave him the idea of using plastics and the newest technologies to make lamps. The name comes from Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting and the moon. Today the company is based in Pregnana Milanese.
Magistretti's lamps
The first big success came with Vico Magistretti. His Eclisse, designed in 1965 and produced from 1967, is a small table lamp with an inner shell that rotates and covers the light as the moon covers the sun, so that the light can be adjusted at will. In 1967 it won the Compasso d'Oro, and it is now at MoMA. The Dalù of 1969, in moulded plastic, was named by Magistretti after his dachshund.
Tizio and Tolomeo
In 1972 Richard Sapper designed the Tizio, a black desk lamp made of arms and counterweights in perfect balance. It has no external wires, because the low-voltage current runs through the arms themselves, and it uses a small halogen bulb. Gismondi chose the name: the lamp had to please “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio”, the Italian equivalent of Tom, Dick and Harry. In 1986 Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina designed the Tolomeo, an aluminium arm lamp with a system of hidden springs and cables, which won the Compasso d'Oro in 1989 and has become a classic in studios all over the world.
Memphis and the “human light”
Gismondi was also one of the leading figures of Memphis, the group founded by Ettore Sottsass in 1981, which he backed as an entrepreneur. In 1994 Artemide received a lifetime Compasso d'Oro, and in 1996 it adopted the motto “The Human Light”, light in the service of people. Gio Ponti, Enzo Mari, Mario Botta, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake are among those who have worked with the company. Gismondi died in Milan in 2020.
Sources
Advertisement
