Vico Magistretti

"The Eclisse lamp is beautiful to look at because the concepts are in themselves beautiful."

"They told me: architect, we need to design a night lamp because everyone goes to bed. And I thought of the blind lantern used by thieves in Victor Hugo's The Miserable."

"Design is a conceptual process that can be communicated over the telephone. About Chimera Lamp. A very simple geometric shape with three cylinders in semi-transparent plastic material. I remember having described it over the telephone without any drawing. Geometry and an extremely simple communication system. After about ten days, I was brought the lamp to my studio."

"About the Chimera Lamp. All my sketches testify to the attempt to give my drawing the task, from its very first formulation, to illustrate the meaning, the soul, that my proposal would like to express, suggesting the technical means and the definitions of the materials necessary for a economic and correct implementation of series production. Therefore, for me, drawing is not reproducing the object in all its morphological and technical details but it is a means of digging deeper and deeper into, to find and express the soul, the essence of the object, or rather the other possible one. reality that exists behind visible reality (look at usual things with unusual eyes). This is, for me, design, and is expressed by sketching. “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” writes René Magritte by way of one of his paintings representing a pipe. Even in design, looking behind the pipe, perhaps there is another thing."

"The Eclissi lamp. He called it concept design, a design so clear and simple it could even be explained in words, over the phone. Vico said he had learned from Latin to recognize the superfluous from the necessary, the indispensable and the useless. And when you design an object, he repeated, you have to know how to recognize what is indispensable. (Ernesto Gismondi)"