In 1959 a young missile engineer, Ernesto Gismondi, founded the Artemide lighting company in Milan. Two years later he commissioned a young architect called Vico Magistretti, who had no experience of designing lights. A totally new and exciting era in lighting design was beginning. Italian light fitting design would go on to lead the world for the next 30 years or more.

The bridge between 1950s and 1960s was built by the Castiglioni brothers, Archille and Pier Giacomo, who put a car headlamp on the end of a fishing rod and pointed it upwards. The result was the Neo-Functionalist Toio Lamp for Flos in 1962.

The Toio Lamp marked a bridge in more ways than one. It signaled the collision of two aesthetics which had run in parallel throughout the century but had rarely met. One one track was domestic lighting, designed to suit the needs of decorated interiors and dating back to the Art Nouveau of Galle and Tiffany. On the other were rugged, utilitarian fittings, forged in the spirit of Behrens and designed for use in factories and mines, where the need for efficient lighting was greater.

The process of taking lighting innovations directly from offices and factories into the home accelerated. It had started with fluorescent strip lighting and was set to continue in the 1970s and 1980s with spotlight track, uplighters and low-voltage systems. The Toio Lamp was also the forerunner to the 'salvage' school of design pioneered in Europe in the 1980s by the London-based designer Ron Arad, in which lighting and furniture would be created from metal and found objects.

THE INTRODUCTION OF PLASTICS

The 1960s saw a period of great creative ferment as new visual ideas and technologies were tested. Materials technology in particular had a profound effect on design. Glass designs had dominated lamp manufacture in the Art Nouveau period, and metalworking was the preferred option in the time of Behrens and the Bauhaus. Right up to the 1960s glass and metal, especially spun steel, were the almost inevitable materials as bulbs emitted too much heat for much else. But then came the revolution in plastics.

In 1924 thiourea formaldehyde plastics, which could be mottled in any color, were invented in Britain. Their earliest use was seen on Bandalasta lamp shades made by Brookes and Adams in the 1920s. But it was not until the 1960s that plastics came into their own in light fittings, with the widespread use of acrylic, variously known as Plexiglass, Perspex or Lucite. This had been invented in Britain by Imperial Chemical Industries in 1933, and developed during World War Two. Now it was made commercially available in transparent, translucent and opaque forms. The Italians seized the initiative in lighting; Milan became a Mecca for international designers, and, in 1971, the German Richard Sapper combined Teutonic precision with Italian sensuality to create the classic Tizio Light for Artemide.

THE MEMPHIS GROUP

During the 1970s the light fitting was the symbol of Italian design, emblazoning its style, founded on sophistication and good taste, around the world. But the rules were about to change. By the end of the decade Milan was the center for such avant-garde groups as Studio Alchimia and a revolution in design was brewing. In 1981 the architect and designer Ettore Sottass launched the first Memphis collection of lights, vases and furniture at the Milan Furniture Fair. The effect was shattering. Memphis had turned its back on Milanese good taste in general and sculptural sophistication in lighting in particular. Instead it gloried in gaudy parody -- of 1950s Italian cappuccino bars, of Egyptology and rock'n'roll.

Fantastic, irrational shapes were employed; lights were combined with other pieces of furniture; clashing color shocked the eyes. The stranglehold of 20th-century Modernism was broken as Memphis ushered in the colorful and chaotic era of Post-Modernist design.

The effects of Memphis were felt throughout international design, but by the mid-1980s its influence was on the wane and there was a classical, revivalist backlash. Many designs from the early years of the century were revived, and some high-performance modern fittings resembled Art Deco lights.

INNOVATION IN THE 1980s

The 1980s proved fascinating for more progressive reasons. It was the decade when everything finally came together: light source and materials technology advanced dramatically; an electicism of visual style asserted itself (due at least in part to Sottsass); and architects began to show the same fierce enthusiasm for the light fitting as industrial designers.

The result was a golden era, a decade of radical and often breathless innovation. Italy held poll position on account of the incredible output of its leading firms and the magnetic hold on buyers of Euroluce, its annual September showcase at the Milan Furniture Fair. But many of the highly acclaimed designers in the Italian hothouse came from elsewhere: Ingo Maurer from West Germany, Philippe Starck from France, Masayuki Kurokawa from Japan.

Technological innovations proved the driving force: computer controls, touch-sensitive switches and low-voltage and mini-fluorescent sources changed the rules of design. Light sources were cooler so there could be new combinations of metal, plastics, paper and wood in fittings. And smaller so wires suspending low-voltage pinpricks of light across ceilings in the work of Maurer and London-based Shiu-Kay Kan introduced a new aesthetic. New breakthroughs in structural engineering prompted parallel innovations in the ability of light to span space; for example, the West German firm Erco commissioned two advanced light systems from the architect Roy Fleetwood.

In fact more innovation in light-fitting design has been crammed into the past 10 years than into the preceding five decades.

The 1990s is characterized by a preoccupation with energy efficiency and environmental issues after the style wars of the 1980s. Much work is going on to harness solar power for lighting. Nature will likely play a more significant role in the lighting of the 21st century.

~ by Jeremy Myerson & Sylvia Katz