Twist&Light

Designed by Marcello Ziliani (born in Brescia in 1963), Twist&Light has a dual inspiration: a floor-lamp like the Stylos by Achille Castiglioni – under whom the designer graduated from Milan Polytechnic in 1988 and in homage to his “unequalled master” – and a vertical bookcase like Bruno Reinaldi’s Ptolomeo which – as Ziliani says – “updated the type by moving it away from the wall and turning it into a dot-like presence in the centre of the room.” (Ptolomeo won the Compasso d’Oro in 2004).

Twist&Light consists in a main support, a luminous PMMA tube holding LED strips and generating uniform light thanks to its opaline finish, plus some added elements, five bent and powder-coated sheet-metal boxes that are a material response to the functional solutions that inspired it.  

The crux of the design centred on how to suspend the boxes simply and inexpensively.   The solution was to take another tube (transparent this time) with a slightly larger diameter, slice it and “dress” the main luminous opaline tube with the boxes created. These are stacked to recreate their structural continuity, acting as spacers and stiffening while, at the same time, allowing fluid rotation and different overall configurations. Twist&Light is a dynamic luminous object offering access to its contents from several angles as well as lending itself to being “furnished” with different object types – books, plants or toys, depending on the function of the room it is placed in.

Mini-domestic architecture, Ziliani is also personally testing the Natevo design system before proposing it to IUAV students in San Marino, where he lectures on product design: “Natevo’s ideas are interesting and in step with the times as well as being demanding: the design of multifunctional objects poses a huge risk of parasite phenomena, by which one function “eats up” the other or restricts it. It is crucial to achieve symbiosis as seen between two organisms that each help the other to perfectly execute its task. There is also the Internet dimension and, most importantly, crowdfunding which I visit regularly and try to promote in my teaching because it is one of the approaches future designers will increasingly have to adopt in order to fund and produce their ideas.”

Now those arguments are in the hands of the students on the degree course in Interactive Design. This is of extreme importance to Natevo, which made the relationship with universities an essential part of its project from the very first. We look forward to seeing the first results submitted for jury selection, which will be soon.