Ilio Floor Lamp

The Tolomeo lamp, balanced on slim aluminium arms with a tilting head, is one of the most recognizable lamps ever made. It belongs to Artemide, founded in Milan in 1960 by Ernesto Gismondi and Sergio Mazza, a company whose designs now sit in the collections of MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Tizio desk lamp is another Artemide classic, still in demand decades after its launch.

Today the catalogue spans desk and task lamps, floor lamps, pendants, wall and ceiling lights and architectural systems. Artemide has worked with Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron and Bjarke Ingels Group, among many others, and it develops its own optics and patented technologies. The company calls its approach Human Light: lighting designed around how people feel, see and work, with efficient LED sources and careful glare control. Sixty years in, Artemide still treats a lamp as an engineering problem and a piece of culture at once.