I thought I would share another film I made for Design Milk – an interview with Michael Anastassiades. In this film he talks about the inspiration behind the two lighting collections he launched in Milan for Flos: IC and String Lights. He cites the balance achieved by a contact juggler, electricity cables running between pylons seen from a train window and fairy lights strung up around village squares as amongst his inspirations…
“String Lights looks at a different concept of how you divide the space architecturally. A little description of these lights: they are inspired by three things…
“The first thing is when I sit on a train travelling, and I look out of the window, you always see these strings of electricity that connect pylons and as you move through at high speed, you see these strings being perfectly parallel and there is this amazing sense of discipline – how can this be possible? It’s just so beautiful, and so poetic, the way that they connect the pylons, but at the same time how they divide the landscape, so I wanted to translate this into interior architecture; this vision and this discipline into an interior environment, and find a way to communicate this in an interior space, because they are like linear drawings.
“Also how you use light to demarcate space, especially outdoor space, if you think of a village square in the Mediterranean at night, they have lights that hang in a perfect square that says “This is where the party is” and the lights demarcate the activity. So this is another thing.
“And then the last thing, which is probably the most practical one, is how do you move lights, because the plug sockets and switches in a house are always at the place you don’t want them, so how do you take them where you want them in the most effortless and poetic way.”
“The other collection is very much about balance, there is a series of lights, table lights, wall lights, ceiling pendants, ceiling mounted lights… they are spheres that rest on rods and they look like they are perfectly balanced on the edge of the rod. I came across a little YouTube clip of a contact juggler – he has these spinning spheres moving around, and they are spinning so perfectly, you can’t even see them move – it looks perfectly balanced and perfectly still, so that gave me an interesting starting point. IC is a code that the English police use when they stop somebody and have to report back to the station and describe the person, they will give a code for the person’s ethnicity. IC1 means Northern European, IC2 means Southern Mediterranean, IC3 is something else, so this is a playful story.”
I found it really inspiring to think that even such an established designer still gets inspired simply by gazing out of a train window or trawling YouTube!
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- interview :: stolen form
- interview :: oki sato
- interview :: jude dennis
- interview :: seven gauge studios
