Luca Nichetto celebrates Josef Frank and Venetian glass in colourful Fusa lamps
Italian designer Luca Nichetto has created a range of glass lights for Swedish heritage brand Svenskt Tenn, marrying together a print by Josef Frank with Venetian glassblowing techniques.
Fusa is a collection of bulbous floor and table lamps, as well as table-top candle holders, made from Murano glass in a variety of jewel-like colours.
The LED light element of the floor and table lamps is enclosed within a frosted glass hood, while the glass candle holders are contained within a globe-shaped clear glass surround.
The stem of each lamp consists of a totem of colourful glass pebbles stacked on top of one another. The murano glass elements contained within the frosted glass hood of the lamps are made in contrasting white or grey glass.
Each piece is set on a round brass base, which also acts a dimmer for the user to adjust the strength of the glow of the electric lamps.
The colours and the swirling patterns in the Murano glass are Nichetto's "personal interpretation" of the Terrazzo textile design by Josef Frank, one of 160 prints by the prolific Austrian architect in the Svenkst Tenn archive. Frank's prints still form a core part of the design brand's collections.
"My first thought when I saw the print was that the stones in the motif looked exactly like a mosaic and murano glass. I highlighted the different formations, combined them and gave them new life in the form of lighting," explained Nichetto.
Nichetto grew up on the island of Murano in Venice, and founded his studio in the city in 2006, before moving to Stockholm in 2011 to set up a second studio.
Each piece in the Fusa collection is handmade in Murano using traditional glassblowing techniques.
"In Murano there are a lot of pieces of glass that are thrown away, and they never really think about the upcycling process," Nichetto told Dezeen.
Nichetto took these pieces of glass and broke them down into small stones, like terrazzo. He melted these in order to fix all the pieces together to create the particular effect, experimenting with different variations of glass.
The collection takes its name from the Italian word for fused, which refers to this special technique used to produce the distinct colours and textures of the glass.
The lights were launched at Stockholm Design Week 2019 and are on display in the Svenkst Tenn store in Stockholm until 31 March 2019 in an exhibition called Heritage.
The exhibition marks 80 years since the founder of Svenkst Tenn, Estrid Ericson, held an exhibition of objects from Murano.
The intention of the current display is to draw "an ideal bridge between the small Italian island in the Venetian lagoon and the city of Stockholm through a celebration of heritages" and to draw attention to the original exhibition.
Nichetto also created a carpet for the floor of the exhibition space inspired by another Frank textile called Mosaic. The carpet in turn directed the design of the podiums on which the lights are positioned in the space.
"I wanted to create a visual connection that from the textile came the carpet, and from the carpet came the lamp," explained the designer.
He hopes that the collection, which is made in a small Murano glass factory, will help glassblowers in the area who are suffering at the moment from a lack of interest in their craft.
"I think our mission as designers is to try and maintain craftsmanship, otherwise in ten years time our kids will never be able to see what we saw. It's something we need to protect," Nichetto said.
Other designers showing lighting at Stockholm Design Week included Jan Klingler, whose lamps are coloured by the bacteria that he grows in a solution of agar on a resin disc to produce distinctive colourful patterns.