3
Foscarini
About shedding light
Forty years have passed, but when we turn on a new lamp it is always a novel
experience. Because there is something magical about that instant in which an idea,
having become an object that spreads its glow, demonstrates its light.
We have discussed, studied, developed, transformed it into a prototype, imagined
it together with the designer for months, sometimes even years. We think we know
all about it: but the thrill that is unleashed in that fi rst moment when the electricity
crosses the lamp is always truly surprising. It is the ancestral fascination with the
birth of light – an immaterial material that shapes our world – which makes us still
say, after forty years, that the most important lamp will always be the next one.
This drives us to cultivate human short circuits with designers, artists, artisans,
without whom not one of our projects could take form.
Because design as we see it, and as it is viewed by those who work with us, means
giving meaning to things through confrontation and constant learning. To make not
another lamp, but that particular light: which speaks to people, makes them feel at
home, fi lls everyday life and its spaces with emotion and atmosphere.
In this job we often have to rack our brains, working stubbornly to achieve
and express that specifi c meaning. Developing the creative thoughts of designers,
exploring technologies and production techniques with the fi nest artisans in the
territory, experimenting with materials, trying things and learning from our
mistakes. Because everything we do today adds a chapter, a paragraph or simply a
sentence to the long history of design.
This has been our corporate culture for forty years: we like to hone and expand
our expertise, to associate light with unexpected materials, to interact with designers
but also artists, photographers, researchers, writers, on projects created to spread
design culture.
It is from who we are that we have to move on to build the next forty years of our
company. The challenge is to preserve a consolidated heritage and to invent new
ways of expressing its essence, using constantly changing tools and operating in
increasingly competitive contexts.
Every enterprise has its own way of being in the world. Ours urges us to work on
complexity in projects, because doing business means making design culture and
producing lamps that are laden with meaning. We will continue to do this, because
it is what we are. And it is also a lot more fun.
Carlo Urbinati
Foscarini Founder and President
3
It always feels like the fi rst time.
