This piece is produced to order by the maker. Production usually takes about 6–8 weeks, after which we despatch it from London.
Because it is built for you, cancellation is limited once production has started on a configuration you specified. Please check the timing before you order — and ask us if the date matters.
Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, setting colour, pattern and deliberate awkwardness against the restraint that Italian design had settled into.
Callimaco, made for Artemide in 1982, is a floor lamp the size of a person: a bright tube with a handle, a cone at the top, and a coil of contrasting colour at the joint. The colours, the plain geometric volumes and the handle are what make it one of the landmark pieces of Sottsass's Radical Design.
The name comes from a Hellenistic poet, and the object behaves more like a figure standing in the room than a light fitting — which was the point: artistic and conceptual research carried into an everyday thing.
Left, two metres of tube standing on its own cone. Right, the handle — the detail that says Sottsass meant an object, not a fitting.
Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, setting colour, pattern and deliberate awkwardness against the restraint that Italian design had settled into.
Callimaco, made for Artemide in 1982, is a floor lamp the size of a person: a bright yellow tube with a handle, a cone at the top, and a coil of red at the joint.
The name comes from a Hellenistic poet, and the object behaves more like a figure standing in the room than a light fitting — which was the point.
Founded in Milan in 1960, Artemide shapes light around people — Tolomeo, Tizio and Eclisse among its classics.
Ernesto Gismondi founded Artemide in Milan in 1960. The catalogue reads as a history of post-war Italian lighting: Vico Magistretti's Eclisse, Richard Sapper's Tizio, and the Tolomeo drawn by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina.
The company works to a philosophy it calls The Human Light — light made for people rather than for its own effect. Design and production are run from Pregnana Milanese, just outside Milan.
