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Foscarini
Lumiere
Orbital
Havana
Mite
About shedding light
It is with Mite, a kind of modern
luminator made with an innovative ‘skin’,
that Foscarini’s partnership with the
designer Marc Sadler began, concurrently
with research into the technical and
expressive possibilities of composite
materials, which led to subsequent
successes. The project drew on the
potential of innovative materials such as
fi breglass and carbon and Sadler had
already developed a prototype: a high
cylinder tapered at either end with a car
headlight at the top. It was simply an idea
to start from, moving past the technical and
aesthetic diffi culties, which deserved to be
developed by those who were familiar with
those materials and knew how to process
them, exploiting the characteristics to
create a lamp body that was light, both
physically and visually, and which would
light up completely, delivering a soft,
warm and welcoming light.
The result of over two years of research,
the fi nal shape uses a circular diffuser that
is 185 cm high, whose shape widens
towards the top, made of fi breglass fabric
with a carbon thread wound around it for
the black version, or made of Kevlar® for
the yellow version. From a processing
perspective, the lamp is shaped in a mould,
onto which a piece of glass fabric is
manually affi xed and then the long fi lament
is wrapped around it. Curing is achieved
through baking in a vacuum furnace
(pressure-controlled). Having said this, it is
clear that the inspiration for the design
stems precisely from the identifi cation of
the material and the processing techniques
– in a sketch of the lamp the designer had
noted down the words ‘artisanat industriel!’
– so the result that Sadler pursued was to
achieve a transparent, unbreakable diffuser
with rowing. This is an industrial process
whereby carbon or Kevlar® threads are
wound, in the case of Mite they are
embedded in a fi breglass fabric and held
together with special resins. The amount
and position of the thread determines the
percentage transparency of the material,
and at the same time gives strength, fl exibi-
lity and light weight using smaller sections,
thereby acting as both decoration and
structure for the lamp. In 2009, to mark its
tenth anniversary, the Mite Special Fusion
Mite /2000 — design Marc Sadler
41
Furnace for ‘curing’ the Mite diffuser.
Chap. 1 — A new design for light
Hand sketches by Marc Sadler when
designing Mite and Tite, prototypes and
detail of the Kevlar® thread.
