Icons: a visual journey between architecture and design celebrating Flos iconic and timeless lamps
More than ten years after the last authorial photo exhibition dedicated to the brand’s most recognized and distinctive historical collections, Flos presents a new visual content that celebrates design culture from its origins, enhancing its still extraordinarily contemporary essence.
With the simple and essential title Icons, the new visual story, characterized by a strong creative and expressive value, is focused on a selection of 12 lamps designed by great design masters, from the brand’s origins to more recent times.
Icons: a visual story expressing the contemporary and timeless style of Flos design
In keeping with the communication choices that have marked its history, Flos collaborated with outstanding professionals to create Icons. The project, conceived and coordinated by Chief Creative Officer Barbara Corti, with art direction and graphic design by Omar Sosa of Apartamento Studios, aims to capture, through the stunning shots of Catalan visual artist Daniel Riera, the essence and meaning of contemporaneity embodied by the selected iconic lamps.
These lamps become a highlight in elegant historic Milanese buildings, built between the 1930s and early 1960s. The precious materials and unique details of floors, stairs, walls, and ceilings evoke the art of Italian architectural masters such as Renato Ferrari, Achille Luigi Ferraresi, Gio Ponti, Alberto Rosselli, and Vito and Gustavo Latis. The dialogue between Italian architecture and the industrial design of masters such as Gino Sarfatti, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, and Tobia Scarpa, and contemporary designers such as Jasper Morrison and Michael Anastassiades creates a perfect harmony of lines and geometries. This results in extreme elegance and refinement that is captured in pure, powerful, and sophisticated images.
Moreover, the lamps in Icons not only interact with architecture, but also engage with stylized human figures that move through the spaces, representing daily life in a way that evokes a typical Italian lifestyle.
The exhibition is developed through a series of color and black-and-white visual representations: the colors enhance the timeless beauty of the design, while the black-and-white snapshots emphasize human interaction and contemporary relevance.
The protagonists of the history of lighting
The protagonists of Icons are unique lamps created between the 1950s and 1960s that are still central in the Flos catalog. These include iconic models such as 2097, Luminator, Arco, Taccia, Taraxacum, Gatto, Snoopy and Biagio. Later, in the 1970s, the brilliant Parentesi emerged, followed in the 1980s by the lightweight Taraxacum 88. Finally, more recent collections such as Glo-Ball and IC have achieved the same iconic status, establishing themselves globally. These lamps continue to shine with the same intensity as when they were created, thanks to Flos’ technical ability to update the light sources while preserving the original design.
Icons will be launched in September 2024 across all brand channels, with content targeting retail, media and PR internationally. The narrative will be presented in digital, print and video formats. To complement the project, Flos has developed a booklet with an introductory essay by Deyan Sudjic, a valuable gift for the public and a useful tool for all design enthusiasts
