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Foscarini
To display and
to show oneself
Beppe Finessi
Chap. 4 — Communicating the culture of light
Deeply interested in an idea of
constant change, and naturally brought
up with an unconditional love of
differences, embraced day by day to
demonstrate an eclectic essence,
Foscarini continues to strive to always
be different, through a history of
creations developed across forty years
of production, the offspring of dozens
of authors, all unique in terms of
background, culture, and origins.
A diversity that has increasingly
become the main characteristic of the
company’s identity. This is an attitude
that allows the fi rm, in a natural way,
to never stand still, in a dynamic of
constant renewal. “Like a catalogue
composed of many individual pages,
our project stems from the grouping of
unique stories and various sensibilities,
linked together by the common
denominators of research, innovation
and poetry”, says Carlo Urbinati,
founder of the company.
To translate and confi rm this DNA in
the moments when the company
presents its lamps in trade fairs or
commercial spaces – where
recognizability is normally the goal –
obviously constitutes an ulterior
challenge. Because displaying items and
showing oneself at the same time is
usually an exercise activated through
coordinated image projects that insist
upon reiterating languages, forms,
stylemes, signs, even colours and
fi nishes. But for a company with the
characteristics of Foscarini, these
moments become new opportunities to
banish the obvious, and to show oneself
– indeed – in an always shifting guise.
Discovering, many years ago, that there
was already a pedigreed designer
‘in-house’, Ferruccio Laviani, with
whom to establish a partnership based
on a very signifi cant word: freedom.
That of the company described above,
and that of a creative architect who is
hard to classify, who shuns repetition
and is truly capable (in his own words)
of doing “everything and its opposite”.
The author of installations where often
the only constant is the highly
identifying presence of the Foscarini
logo, redesigned by Artemio Croatto/
Designwork and still timely in its
proportions, but also accelerated,
broken down and pushed to the limits
of its own recognizability by the
architectural solutions proposed.
Displays that are always able to
express originality, as already happened
twenty years ago at Euroluce 2005:
a space of vivid character, forcefully
asserted by the colours red and black,
which in the deep darkness made the
products the protagonists, bringing
their image to the fore.
Also on the next occasion (Euroluce
2007), the image proposed was a
volume of “black leather conveyed in
multifaceted volumes, suggesting
the forms of a diamond”.
A project that highlighted the versatility
of the brand, “a company that gathers,
develops and enhances multiple design
About shedding light
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