From Merano lamp experiments to the Castiglioni brothers’ Arco and Taraxacum, Flos’s history links design ideas to materials, manufacture and changing ways of lighting a home.
From Merano experiments to Flos
Flos’s own history opens before the company’s formal 1962 chapter. In the early 1960s, Dino Gavina and Merano maker Eisenkeil turned from furniture to lamps with Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Afra and Tobia Scarpa. The chronology then marks 1962 as “Becoming Flos,” when an industrial structure in Brescia gave designers room to develop the new lighting project.1
Cocoon and the first lamps
The first lamps also grew from a material process: the Cocoon technique, conceived in the United States and experimented with by Eisenkeil. The Castiglioni brothers and the Scarpas applied it to early designs such as Taraxacum and Fantasma.1
Arco: a streetlight idea for the home
Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed Arco in 1962 after observing how a streetlight could illuminate a wide area from a fixed point on the ground. The floor lamp brings that logic indoors: a long arch carries light over a table or seating area without a ceiling fixture. Its marble base, steel arch and deliberately placed lifting hole turn structure into part of the design explanation.2
The essentials
- Founded
- 1962, Bovezzo
- Headquarters
- Bovezzo, Italy
- Official site
- flos.com
