FLOS

1960 A bright idea At the origin of Flos there is a bright thought: the idea of giving birth to objects suitable to change the way of living, not only of Italians. So at the beginning of the 60s a certain Mr Gavina, with the small producer of Merano Eisenkeil, gets in the lead - after having created many new furniture (with the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Afra and Tobia Scarpa and other masters of design) - that it is also time to create new lamps. So the Castiglioni and the Scarpa, with the cocoon technique, conceived in the USA and experimented by Eisenkeil, begin to make lamps such as the Taraxacum or the Fantasma. Many other lamps, beautiful and surprising, follow these first ones: so already from its prehistory Flos (Fiore, in Latin, name that Pier Giacomo Castiglioni chooses for her) finds himself reinventing the idea of artificial lighting. 

1962
Becoming Flos

How does an industry become a laboratory where the idea of "lamp" is revolutionized? For Sergio Gandini, who began to manage Flos in 1963, there is no contradiction between the business project and creative imagination: combined they will lead his company to success. The industrial infrastructure of Brescia is perfect for giving designers maximum freedom of action, be it the Jucker lamp by Tobia Scarpa - inspired by the Bauhaus - or the revolutionary Arco dei Castiglioni. First and for a long time unique among the Italian design industries, Flos bases its strategies on what today would be called a Think Tank. Gandini and his exclusive designers (Castiglioni, Scarpa) decide together products, communication, image... Together they trace the lines of their desires, the design lines that will lead to the creation of the most iconic lamps in the history of lighting.

1962 Taccia by A. & P.G. Castiglioni

Achille Castiglioni original drawing for Arco.

1972
From the MoMA to the World

The 1972 exhibition “Italy The New Domestic Landscape” at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, the most important contemporary art museum in America, reveals to the world an unprecedented popular italian phenomenon in industrial and artistic culture. Flos appears in the exhibition with many lamps, especially by the Castiglioni brothers: this is its international consecration as an avant-garde enterprise and since then the popularity and development of the company go hand in hand. Production (with new factories), the market (with the first foreign fsubsidiaries) and the catalogue of products, also with the acquisition of Gino Sarfatti’s Arteluce, grew between the 1970s and the 1980s. And it is yet another exhibition, the great solo exhibition of Achille Castiglioni that since 1984 has been held in museums of eight European capitals, from Vienna to Madrid, to confirm that the Flos experience is unique, unrepeatable and unpredictable in its continuous evolution