A selection of floor lamps that have made a significant contribution to the history of design, that are produced industrially, and still in production today.
Our selection extends up to the 1970s, a point after which design evolved, making room for different techniques and trends that define contemporary design research.
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Chiara, Mario Bellini
The Chiara lamp was conceived by Italian designer Mario Bellini, who sought to create a lamp that would conceal the bulb while incorporating compositional elements such as a cone and a kind of hat. Bellini’s respect for materials and classical proportions, combined with a strong inclination for experimentation, led him to fold a single sheet of metal. This sheet forms a metallic column, with its ends bent at the top to create a hat-like structure. A major success for both Bellini and Flos, the lamp is now also available in a smaller version as a table lamp.
Boalum, L. Castiglioni e G. Frattini
Designed by Livio Castiglioni and Gianfranco Frattini in the late 1960s, Boalum is a Pop-inspired object perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist of its time. The lamp’s inspiration came from a vacuum cleaner hose, a flexible PVC structure into which the designers placed a series of 25 bulbs (now LED). The result is a versatile piece that can be used as a floor lamp, table lamp, or suspended light, encouraging interaction and allowing the light tube to be repositioned according to mood or occasion. The designers also prompt us to reflect on the object itself: what exactly is a lamp, and what is its purpose?
FLAMINGO, Alvaro Siza
Designed by architect Álvaro Siza in 1972, the Flamingo lamp was one of the first products released by BD Barcelona Design, founded that same year. It features a slender chrome-plated iron structure and two adjustable aluminum wings that reflect the light. Its elongated shape, inspired by the silhouette of a flamingo, allows for various uses, from softly lighting a dinner table to providing focused light for reading in bed. The pared-back form reflects the principle of simplism that also guides Siza’s architectural work: reducing to the essential while maintaining a strong connection to function and context. Since its debut, it has remained one of the Spanish company’s enduring bestsellers.
Fortuny, di Mariano Fortuny
Faithfully reimagined with modern materials by the producer Pallocco, the Fortuny floor lamp looks like a creation by a contemporary designer. Its aesthetic, a blend of industrial and ready-made styles, stands as a testament to the visionary creativity of Mariano Fortuny, the Venetian artist who designed the lamp back in 1907. Composed with a tripod for cameras and an inverted lampshade, the Fortuny lamp is both ingenious and interesting, an object that harnesses indirect and adjustable lighting to craft an elegant and modern ambiance.
Tube Light, Eileen Gray
Tube Light is a floor lamp designed by Eileen Gray in the 1920s as a furnishing complement for her iconic Villa E-1027 on the French Riviera. A masterpiece by the modernist designer, Tube Light is a floor lamp stripped of its lampshade and any other decoration, an avant-garde move for its time. What remains is a metal base, a fluorescent tube light, and a chrome metal support, an elegant and refined object that perfectly embodies the modernist aesthetic of the 1920s.
Luminator, Pietro Chiesa
One of the leading figures of Art Deco in Italy, Pietro Chiesa was a prolific and successful Italian designer. In the 1930s, he became the artistic director of FontanaArte alongside Gio Ponti, and it was during this period that he designed Luminator, his most famous lamp. Still in production nearly a century after its creation, Luminator was a major success as it introduced indirect lighting into Italian homes—an innovation previously used only by photographers. With its elegant chalice-like shape, Luminator is an imposing yet refined lamp with a distinctive character.
Akari, Isamu Noguchi
The Akari Light Sculptures collection was designed starting in 1951 by artist, sculptor, and designer Isamu Noguchi and is now produced by Vitra. The name Akari, which means brightness and lightness in Japanese, reflects the essence of these light sculptures, which pay homage to traditional Japanese paper lanterns. The result is a collection of beautiful objects that achieved tremendous success and remain cherished by design enthusiasts to this day. Over the years, Noguchi continued to expand his light sculpture designs, creating a catalog of about 100 models, including many pendant, floor, and table lamps.
Grässhoppa, Greta Magnusson Grossman
The Grässhoppa floor lamp is one of the most successful designs by renowned Swedish designer and architect Greta Magnusson Grossman, one of the first women to practice as an architect and designer in 1940s Sweden. After moving to the United States post-war, Magnusson Grossman became an icon of European architecture in Hollywood, designing interiors and buildings for film stars, including Greta Garbo. Her furniture and objects are characterized by slim, elongated forms that are expressive, modern, and adaptable to any interior.
Luminator, Pier Gicomo & Achille Castiglioni
According to Achille Castiglioni, the Luminator lamp was created “as our response to the demand for a ‘useful form’ for Italian industry,” spurred by the establishment of the Compasso d’Oro prize by Rinascente the previous year. The Castiglioni brothers designed a lamp that was elegant, minimalist, and aesthetically refined. They did that while keeping production costs low by using readily available materials, and ensuring ease of transport and assembly. Thus, Luminator was born (the name pays tribute to Pietro Chiesa’s lamp), becoming a symbolic object of postwar Italian design—a piece that remains relevant and interesting seventy years after its creation.
Toio, Pier Giacomo & Achille Castiglioni
Toio is one of the Castiglioni brothers’ lamps that, upon its release in 1962, did not achieve much success. A peculiar and challenging object even today, it must have seemed entirely foreign to a 1960s audience. In retrospect, we can say that it was indeed its avant-garde qualities that made Toio a timeless piece. In this design, the Castiglioni brothers explicitly embraced ready-made elements and assembly, incorporating an American car headlight, a transformer, and the rings of a fishing rod. It is a brave and playful concept, resolved with the intelligence and elegance that only the Castiglioni brothers could deliver.
Arco, Pier Giacomo & Achille Casiglioni
The Arco lamp by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, a 1960s design, is so ingenious, expressive, and original that it has achieved the status of both an icon and, perhaps, a cliché. A subject of debates, editions, imitations, and academic studies, Arco remains one of the Castiglioni brothers’ finest works. It was awarded the Compasso d’Oro Product Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018 and is featured in major design museums worldwide, from the Triennale in Milan to the MoMA in New York. Despite criticism and the overuse of its sophisticated image, Arco endures as one of the Castiglioni brothers’ great achievements and a prime example of Italian design.
Sanremo Floor Lamp, Archizoom
The Sanremo floor lamp is one of the emblematic pieces of 1960s Italian Radical Design, a movement rooted in Tuscany that sought to transform architecture and design by subverting the semantic value of objects. This lamp was created by one of the Archizoom members, Dario Bartolini, as a gift for his fiancée, Lucia Marazzi, for their wedding celebration at a villa in Roccamare designed by Ernesto Nathan Rogers. The rest is history.
Ultrafragola, Ettore Sottsass
Ultrafragola is a lamp-mirror, a furnishing accessory designed by the master of Italian design in 1970 and unveiled at “Eurodomus” (a precursor to the Salone del Mobile) that same year. The mirror was part of the Mobili Grigi series—a unique chapter in Sottsass’s work featuring muted-colored furniture with integrated neon lights. Of this legendary series, only Ultrafragola is still in production, while the other pieces exist only as prototypes. Striking, not particularly functional, and very popular on social media, Ultrafragola is enjoying a resurgence, much like other clever and unconventional vintage designs.
