Acrilica, Atollo and beyond: 80 of Oluce and how light has changed

"A table lamp consisting of an acrylic convector for a linear fluorescent bulb and a white lacquered base. It won the gold medal at the XIII Milan Triennale; it costs 54,000 lire." It is 1965 and Domus, in its column "Per chi deve scegliere lampade di serie", presents the Acrilica by Joe Colombo — a lamp destined to enter the history of Italian design and that of Oluce, the company that still produces it today. It is a history, that of Oluce, that begins twenty years earlier, in 1945, when Italy is still picking up its pieces and the design of a lamp is already, in some way, an act of faith in the future. A future that would indeed prove extraordinary, marked by the passage of the most gifted designers and lighting objects that would change the rules of the game. A future that began eighty years ago and is today celebrated in an exhibition at the Adi Design Museum in Milan.

Curated by Francesco Rota, the exhibition traces all the fundamental milestones of the company, with archival pieces, loans from collectors, drawings, articles and photographs. It begins with the founding by Giuseppe Ostuni — who lent the first letter of his surname to the brand name — and his early lamps, leading up to the artistic direction of Tito Agnoli, which marked the first major successes and an international reputation. Agnoli's Model 387 is still in production today: a minimal lamp that slides along a stem fixed to a travertine base, allowing the user to "move the light" according to need. From the late 1950s, the following two decades belong to the great masters. Joe Colombo himself, initially working alongside his brother Gianni, designed the Spider lamp, which earned him a Compasso d'Oro and which a few years later travelled to New York for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, the most important exhibition ever dedicated to Italian design, curated by Emilio Ambasz. Marco Zanuso invented another way of interacting with light: his Model 275 (1963) is a large circular white diffuser that rotates on a pivot.

In the 1970s ownership passed to the Verderi family and artistic direction to Vico Magistretti, who continued to bring Oluce into homes, hotels, magazines, films and trade fairs — above all through one essential, elemental silhouette: his Atollo. It is perhaps the most accomplished of his "telephone projects" — those he could describe in words alone and have them understood. It won the Compasso d'Oro in 1979 and remains one of the best-selling lamps to this day.

The legacy of these names endures and renews itself through successive generations up to the present day. The decisive turning point in lighting comes in the 2000s with the shift from the incandescent bulb to led — from the fixed shape of the bulb to any shape at all. Walking through the lamps on display, this transition becomes legible as a metamorphosis in the design approach to the typology: the challenge had always originated from the bulb itself — the need to turn a single light source into many different kinds of light, to replace it without burning oneself, to move it and adjust it. In the earliest lamps, the relationship between the shape of the bulb and the shape of the lamp is unmistakable: the first generates the second, the second follows the first.

From the led era onwards, Oluce's output reflects a more heterogeneous research and a more personal interpretation of the lighting object, shaped by whichever designer is involved — from Humberto and Fernando Campana to Nendo, Nicola Gallizia, Victor Vasilev and Francesco Rota himself.

The exhibition at the Adi Design Museum is a reckoning — of technologies, materials and design visions that over eighty years have redefined what a lamp can be. From the bulb that dictated form to the freedom offered by led, Oluce has managed to change without losing sight of itself. The next chapters are already in the making, shaped by the defining concerns of contemporary design. A history eighty years long that has not yet finished surprising us.