Milan 2013: London designer Michael Anastassiades presented lamps strung between walls on fine cables for Italian lighting brand Flos last week.
The String Lights by Michael Anastassiades for Flos resemble infrastructure like telegraph wires or European street lighting, with the thin black electrical cord drawing geometric shapes in the air.
These flexes are hung with black conical or spherical pendants, fitted with LED light sources.
Flos also presented Konstantin Grcic's reworking of the iconic Parentesi lamp by Achille Castiglioni at Euroluce, which took place alongside the Salone Internazionale del Mobile from 9 to 14 April.
See all our stories about lighting design »
See all our stories about design at Milan 2013 »
Here's some more information from Flos:
"Every time I take the train, I sit by the window and watch the series of perfectly parallel strings connecting the pylons, as we move at high speed. I love the way they divide the landscape and how spheres are occasionally beaded through the wires at random intervals. I also love how, in Mediterranean cultures, strings of lights are stretched between posts to mark an outdoor space for an evening party in a village square. And finally, I love how human ingenuity works around problems created by everyday things in the house (like switches and power points) that others have chosen to position where we don’t want them."
This is how Michael Anastassiades, a Cypriot designer based in London and born in 1967, describes the principle that inspired the String Lights ceiling lamp: a black electric wire that sets up a relationship with the architecture of a space, precisely becoming part of the lines formed by the walls of a room. And stretched out along these lines are two different light sources: one in the shape of an isosceles triangle, the other in the form of a sphere.
A system of tensors gives volume and three-dimensionality to the form outlined by this lightweight cord that plays with space, while the two LED lamps emit a warm light.
Minimal and poetic like a pencil line drawn in the air, String Lights is an original suspension, both conceptually simple and bold at the same time. Anastassiades has always sought the primordial and original essence of forms and materials.
His designs move towards abstraction, in a search for purity that pursues an exercise of stripping away, taking objects and materials back their original dimension of bareness.
"My work springs from an idea of subtraction. Because a naked object brought back to its bare essentiality is the ultimate, definitive expression of beauty." His is a deceptive simplicity, giving rise to objects imbued with unexpected vitality, and displaying the highest quality craftsmanship.
