Nanda Vigo, space age desk lamp, Arredoluce, Milano Italy, 1970

The lighting company Arredoluce opened in 1943, at the start of a golden era of modernist Italian design, and was born of the confluence of an eager entrepreneurial business spirit and a fresh, innovative, forward-looking creative atmosphere.

Angelo Lelii (1911–79), the founder of Arredoluce, which was based in the Milanese district of Monza, was a gifted and at times brilliant designer. He had the insight to commission works from other greats of the day, including Gio Ponti, Vico Magistretti, the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and Ettore Sottsass Jr.

Lelii’s designs cover a broad aesthetic range. His most famous work, the Triennale floor lamp (circa 1947), is both elegant and practical, with three omnidirectional lighting booms attached to a central pole. His well-known ceiling light of 1954 — in which a conical canister bounces light upward off a lighting-arced enameled-aluminum sheet — is a piece of design poetry. And his 1962 Cobra table lamp has a wild, almost surreal look, featuring a sculptured rod of polished metal with a socket that, like his Eye floor lamp of the early 1960s, holds an eyeball-like directional bulb. 

Arredoluce also placed few constraints on the creativity of the designers it employed from outside the company. The Castiglioni brothers’ Turbino table lamp of 1951, for example, is a remarkably early example of minimalist design. The company both fostered the tradition-minded aspect of Gio Ponti’s sensibility and produced several of his experimental pieces in Lucite in the 1950s; and Sottsass’s UFO table lamp of 1957, a sandwich of two plastic bubbled tablets on four legs, prefigures the look of his postmodern works for the Memphis Group by more than 20 years. From the stylish and utilitarian to the avant-garde, lighting by Arredoluce includes some of the most diverse, remarkable — and collectible — designs of the late 20th century.