Gino Sarfatti: Lights

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti 

Gino Sarfatti studied aeronaval engineering at the University of Genoa. From 1939 onwards he worked in the lighting sector and set up Arteluce which soon became a national and international reference point for the Modern Architecture movement in lighting.

During his thirty years of activity, Sarfatti designed and produced over 400 luminaires and carried out non-stop research into innovation as regards typology, materials, production technologies, light sources, technical lighting effects and design aspects.

Gino Sarfatti 

Entirely self-taught, Sarfatti developed nearly 700 floor lamps, chandeliers, spotlights and other “light fittings,” as he called them, between the mid-1930s and early 1970s.

During that time, Sarfatti experimented continuously with new types of light sources, wiring, switches, reflectors, transformers and other components to refine his designs, and co-founded a company, Arteluce, to manufacture them. But after selling the business in 1973, he forsook both lighting and design by retiring to Lake Como to pursue another passion, dealing in rare stamps, until his death in 1985.

Many of his lights are still in production, but Sarfatti was largely forgotten outside design circles until the opening of a retrospective of his work at La Triennale Design Museum in Milan. It celebrated the centenary of his birth by exhibiting 200 of his “light fittings,” including some that he used in his home.

Fittingly for the man who printed “Gino Sarfatti — Lighting razionale” (rational lighting) on the stationery of his first workshop, his output is presented simply and lucidly in a large open-plan space at La Triennale. Curated by the Italian designers, Marco Romanelli and Sandra Severi Sarfatti, who is Sarfatti’s daughter-in-law, the exhibition is divided into three sections: 1936 to 1945, 1946 to 1961 and 1962 to 1973. The lights from each era, including ones owned by the Sarfatti family and the French collectors, Clémence and Didier Krzentowski, as well as Flos, the Italian lighting company that bought Arteluce, are one after another on white backdrops, making it easy to identify Sarfatti’s preoccupations during particular periods and to trace the progress of his experiments with various themes over the years.

The result is a rousing tribute to an unusually inventive designer. Most of his peers entered design after studying art or architecture, but Sarfatti’s roots were in engineering, which defined his way of working. Born in Venice, he planned to become an aeronautical engineer, but had to leave university when his father’s business failed. The family moved to Milan and Sarfatti took a job as a salesman to help to make ends meet. He designed his first lamp by default when a family friend asked him to turn a glass vase into one. Sarfatti placed a lighting fixture from a coffee machine inside the vase, and was so intrigued by the process that he opened the “rational lighting” workshop to produce more lights.

Bereft of conventional training, he had to improvise and developed each product by working directly with the artisans in the workshop, rather than by sketching ideas and leaving them to produce models or prototypes, as most other designers did at the time. By doing so, he steeped himself in the technical logistics of lighting production and was able to use that knowledge to devise increasingly ingenious ways of constructing different lights and in making the most of Italy’s enviable network of specialist suppliers and fabricators.

In 1939, only a few years after making his first light, Sarfatti co-founded Arteluce. When Milan was bombed during World War II, he moved production to Brianza in the foothills of the Alps and lived there with his family, before fleeing to Switzerland. His father was Jewish and the Sarfattis were fearful of the threat of persecution by Italy’s fascist regime. Sarfatti spent the rest of the war living in secrecy and penury in a Swiss convent, before returning to Milan in 1945 and taking charge of Arteluce again.

Ever the rationalist, he believed that a product’s design should be determined by its function, and that the designer and manufacturer shared a duty to exploit any advances in technology to that end. He always strove to make his lights slimmer, lighter, stronger, more flexible, faster to manufacture (and therefore cheaper) and easier to disassemble for repairs and maintenance.

At the start of his career, he focused on developing directional beams that could be moved wherever the user wished and on producing lamps with two levels of lighting: one glowing upward; the other downward. After the war, Sarfatti became obsessed by creating increasingly sophisticated lighting effects from newly developed light sources and by using hooks and weights to adjust the shape of his lamps. In the 1960s, he encouraged other designers, including Franco Albini, Cini Boeri and Massimo Vignelli, to work for Arteluce, but continued to design himself and to experiment with technological breakthroughs, particularly with new joints, switches and transformers.

Even the earliest pieces in the exhibition are simple and unobtrusive in style, qualities that became more pronounced over the years as his work grew more technically accomplished. Most of Sarfatti’s designs have the purist beauty of thoughtfully made tools, and his utilitarianism was reflected in his decision to identify each model by a numerical code, rather than a name. He identified six categories of lights and allotted a different sequence of numbers to each one: tens for spotlights, 100 onward for wall lamps, 500 onward for reading lamps and so on. Typically he manufactured a few hundred examples of each design, and if a particular model was discontinued he would re-allocate its number to a new one.

Occasionally, Sarfatti indulged himself. The 2072 ceiling light was nicknamed the “Yo-Yo” in a nod to its circular shades, and the 2076 chandelier dubbed “Fireworks” because of its shape. He used craggy slabs of marble as the bases of floor lamps, and added an ashtray to one light and a walking stick to another. His most spectacular project was one of the last -- the hundreds of plexiglass pipes he installed in Teatro Regio in Turin in 1972 when it was being restored by the dark prince of Italian design, Carlo Mollino. It was known by a name, “The Cloud,” not a number.

Gino Sarfatti