The Pipistrello lamp by Gae Aulenti turns 60

There are objects that do not belong to a specific season of design, but rather to its ability to surprise. Pipistrello, designed by Gae Aulenti in 1965 for the Olivetti showroom in Paris and produced by Martinelli Luce, has lived for sixty years in that threshold of perception where forms become characters. It does not simply illuminate: it inhabits space, interprets it, and defines its rhythm. From the outset, Aulenti refused to conceive the lamp as a technical device. Instead, she treated it as a complex organism in dialogue with its environment. In Pipistrello, this idea materializes through a carefully orchestrated balance of geometries, volumes, and subtle figurative allusions. The white methacrylate diffuser — extremely difficult to produce with the molding technologies of the time — evokes the silhouette of the nocturnal winged creature without ever slipping into literal reference. It is an image that vibrates through subtraction: a presence suggested, never described.

Aulenti structures the lamp like a small piece of architecture: the base as foundation, the telescopic stem as trunk or column, the diffuser as a kind of capital.
This tripartite verticality gives the lamp an architectural discipline, a quiet order that anchors the freedom of its design. Its plan reveals a calibrated construction, where the complexity of the curves finds an exact equilibrium. As in all of Aulenti’s work, the sensuality of form is interwoven with the precision of the rapidograph: no curve is arbitrary, no detail improvised. The telescopic mechanism — anything but simple to industrialize in the 1960s — allows the lamp to assume a double identity: a table lamp when lowered, a floor lamp when raised. A solution that anticipated a flexibility now taken for granted, but which in 1965 was an act of bold experimentation.

Sergio Camilli, founder of Poltronova

The lamp was born for an extraordinary space: the Olivetti showroom in Paris, described by Domus at the time “as a character”. A space conceived as an “Italian piazza”, composed of geophysical curves, continuous levels, white laminate surfaces, chromed bands, a red capsule surrounding the central column, and a Senufo anthropomorphic sculpture acting as a symbolic axis. Within this fluid, almost theatrical landscape, Pipistrello found its natural habitat. Its luminous wings conversed with the curved surfaces, guiding the gaze and building a visual rhythm. Domus spoke of “fantastic lamps on the various levels”: not accessories, but presences that co-defined the space.

The lamp’s production history is one of obstacles, attempts, and perseverance. It was Sergio Camilli, founder of Poltronova, who introduced the project to Elio Martinelli with a sentence that became legendary: “Gae has this lamp she would like to make…”. The project remained in Martinelli’s drawers for a year: the telescopic stem was complex to engineer, and the diffuser — with its sinuous, wing-like surfaces — seemed almost impossible to mold. Yet that difficulty, that irreducibility, was already part of the lamp’s identity. Every element was new, untraceable to any existing model. This is why Pipistrello still appears as a “different” kind of modernity: unaligned, lateral, surprising.

Pipistrello’s strength lies in its plurality: it is a rigorous micro-architecture, a scenographic object, an almost animistic figure, and a calibrated lighting machine. Aulenti brought into the project her passion for theatre, for staging, for exhibition design — combined with an absolute mastery of technical drawing and construction. In this intertwining — freedom and rigor, fantasy and structure, imagination and geometry — Pipistrello finds its uniqueness.

Since its debut in the Olivetti showrooms, the lamp has travelled the world, taking on new variants developed with Aulenti and later continued by Martinelli Luce: aluminum finishes, reduced sizes, cordless versions, workstation models.
Today, on its 60th anniversary, it returns in a refined White Matt edition, reaffirming a contemporaneity that owes nothing to nostalgia, but everything to the intrinsic quality of the project. Those who worked with Aulenti — recalls Emiliana Martinelli — remember a determined, authoritative personality, capable of seeing the project in its entirety, without hesitation. Pipistrello carries these traces: it is not conciliatory, not decorative, not timid.
It is autonomous, assured, capable of inhabiting space without ever overwhelming it. It carries the quiet strength of designs that know exactly what they want to be.

Sixty years later, Pipistrello continues to surprise precisely because it escapes predictability. It is neither modernist nor postmodern: it lives according to its own coherence, outside categories.
It is an icon not because it represents an era, but because it transcends it.
A lamp that illuminates space, but above all interprets it. And perhaps this is the true secret of its longevity.