Launched this year at Milan's international furniture fair, the new Tuareg lamp was designed by Ferruccio Laviani for Italian lighting company Foscarini, reports Jeanne-Marie Cilento
Contemporary art is one of the sources of inspiration for the prolific Laviani and the new lamp is designed to look like an installation that could be in a gallery. The Italian designer also created the dazzling Good Vibrations cabinet for Fratelli Boffi, another of his designs exhibited at the Salone del Mobile in April.
When Michele De Lucchi was a key member of the influential Memphis group in the 1980s, Laviani went to work at his studio as a young designer. The Bourgie lamp Laviani later designed for Kartell became one of the iconic pieces in the neo-baroque movement. However, the new Tuareg lamp has a more anarchic form like a group of sticks flung together. The minimalist, sculptural look is created by seemingly random intersecting tubes. At more than two metres high, the Tuareg can be used as a reading, wall or floor lamp and has three lights that can be turned on and off individually.
The structure of the design is in three parts with branches each housing an LED light that can be adjusted 320 degrees. Colour also plays an important role in the design and defines the silhouette. The lamp is in two different hues, orange which is meant to suggest the anti-rust paints used to coat industrial piping and a contrasting matt black.
Click play to see the interview with designer Ferruccio Laviani.