Italian Filoti Floor Lamp by Piero Lissoni for Artemide, 1993

Born in 1956 in Brianza, Italian designer and architect Piero Lissoni studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, graduating in 1985. Together with his longtime partner Nicoletta Canesi, Lissoni founded Studio Lissoni (later renamed Lissoni Associati) in 1986, and the pair cofounded Graph.x in 1996 to focus on graphics projects.

Based in Milan, Lissoni is known for its clean, modern, industrial aesthetic. Lissoni Associati works in all areas of design, including industrial design, art direction, architecture, luxury hotels (notably the Conservatorium Hotel in Amsterdam), showrooms (Cassina in London , Boffi in Milan and New York), corporate headquarters, boats, and private residences. The Lissoni name is perhaps best known, however, for prolific modern designs in furniture, kitchen systems, and housewares. The studio collaborates with some of the world’s most famous brands, including Kartell, Knoll, Flos, Boffi, and Alessi, among others.

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.