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Pipistrello Oro LED Dimmable Table Lamp

Gae Aulenti
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This 50th anniversary special version with base and knob in 24k (4 μm) Gold is a limited edition of 50 + 1 signed and numbered with certificate of guarantee.

 

Created in the mid-sixties by renowned architect and industrial designer Gae Aulenti, the Pipistrello table lamp was an instant success that almost immediately acquired the status of a "must-have" piece of decoration and could soon be found in sophisticated interiors from Milan to Paris, London, New York and beyond. 

With its ornate, Art Nouveau-style lines the lamp draws from forms found in nature, specifically the swooping shape of a bat (pipistrello in Italian). The four sections of the lampshade, crafted from frosty white opal methacrylate, clearly evoke the seductive curvature of wings and diffuse the light emitted to a gentle glow. 

The shade is height-adjustable thanks to its telescopic steel stem and the Pipistrello can easily morph from table lamp to floor lamp and vice-versa. 

This true icon of modern Italian design is prominently displayed in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including both the MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York but also the Centre Pompidou in Paris where Gae Aulenti would later be commissioned to refit the museum space.  

The lamp has now made its way into the 21st century with LED technology. 

This 50th anniversary special version with base and knob in 24k (4 μm) Gold is a limited edition of 50 + 1 signed and numbered with certificate of guarantee. 

Gae Aulenti (1927-2012) was an Italian architect and a prolific designer of furniture, lighting and theatre sets. Aulenti was one of the few women working in architecture and design in postwar Italy and her talents found a vast range of outlets, from showrooms for Fiat and Olivetti to sets for La Scala, the opera house in Milan, to private villas for the rich. But it is for her work in museums and exhibition design that she was best known - and for her largest project, which also proved to be her most divisive.

She was chosen in 1981 to convert the Beaux Arts-style Gare d'Orsay railway station in Paris into a new home for impressionist art. Her proposal transformed the cavernous central hall, a magnificent barrel-vaulted train shed lit by arching roof lights, into an open exhibition space, with the insertion of modern industrial materials. Original cast-iron beams and plaster rosettes were contrasted with wire mesh partitions and new rough stone walls, on which the collection, of mainly French art from 1848 to 1915, was daringly hung.
Her defiant disposition was evident from the beginning. Born in the town of Palazzolo dello Stella, near Trieste, Gaetana Aulenti decided to study architecture as a form of rebellion against her parents' desires for her to become "a nice society girl".
On graduating from Milan Polytechnic in 1954 (as one of only two women in a class of 20), she joined Casabella magazine and quickly became part of the "Neo Liberty" movement. Reacting against the dominance of modernism and the monotonous legacy of the Bauhaus, it argued for a revival of local building traditions and individual expression - something that Aulenti pursued in all aspects of her life, as a fierce opponent of fashion.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, Aulenti produced furniture for Milan's major design houses.
In the early 80s she was the artistic director at FontanaArte, creating timeless lamps and furnishing elements for the company that are still in the catalogue.
One of her most famous pieces, a coffee table in the form of a thick square of glass supported on four black casters, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The houses she went on to design in the 70s and 80s shared a similarly postmodern sensibility. With echoes of buttresses and primal pitched-roof forms, they reveal a taste for references to pre-classical architecture and a sense of elementary construction. In many ways they are a strong reflection of her character, described by the Italian writer Alberto Arbasino as "a cross between bucolic charm and the solid mentality of an engineer".
Such a combination was perhaps a necessary weapon in such a male-dominated profession. Aulenti said she managed to get her way with tough construction crews by making them think of her as their mother "whom they must please", and she had an equally commanding approach to working with existing buildings by revered architects.

Aulenti enjoyed what she called the "double ambiguity" of working in existing contexts, juxtaposing elements of the past with the present. As well as the Musée d'Orsay and the Palazzo Grassi, she designed the permanent collection galleries of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Palacio Nacional in Barcelona and, most recently, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
"There are plenty of other talented female architects, but most of them seem to link up with men," said Aulenti, who divorced twice. "I've always worked for myself, and it's been quite an education. Women in architecture must not think of themselves as a minority, because the minute you do, you become paralysed. It is most important to never create the problem."
During her lifetime she received many prizes and awards, including: "Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur" (Paris), Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects; Praemium Imperiale for Architecture (Tokyo), "Knight Grand Cross" of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Rome), honorary degree in the Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA).

Source: The Guardian

Martinelli Luce was founded in 1950 thanks to the intuition and the desire of Elio Martinelli to build his own lighting fixtures. Martinelli began to create a vast production of lamps for interiors, with more and more attention to domestic use. Inspired by nature and geometry, Martinelli creates functional lighting fixtures, highly innovative lighting design and products with materials according to their intrinsic characteristics.

The collection includes Italian lightings of the 1960s and 1970s that have marked the history of design. Some of these lightings, along with others like the Pipistrello and the Ruspa, designed by architect Gae Aulenti, are kept in the most important design museums.

Emiliana Martinelli, who heads the company for many years, now joined by her son Marco, carries on the design inspired by the same principles of her father.

 

Table lamp

Gold plated (24k) base, telescopic height adjustable mechanism in stainless steel, diffuser in white opal methacrylate

SPECIFICATIONS

Diameter 55cm, height 66-86cm
Integrated LED source with dimmer included
14W LED (2700K)
50th anniversary limited edition of 50 numbered pieces

Made in Italy

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