Tizio lamp

‘TIZIO’ HAS turned 50. Not as one might think the half-century of a faded Italian pop star or the diminutive of a former AC Milan striker, but in this case that of an infinitely variable work lamp and cult object from the Artemide lighting company And, for those who savour minimalist aesthetics and clever design,theneplusultraofdesktopillumination

TheEnglishtranslationofTizioissomething like ‘bloke’ or ‘mate’ and this rather odd name for a light was chosen by Ernesto Gismondi, founder of Artemide, who was inspired by the expression Tizio, Caio e Sempronio, the Italian equivalent of ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ His train of thought at the time was that after Tizio he could coax its designer into completing a wittily named lighting trio with ‘Caio’ and ‘Sempronio’ as companion pieces

Having studied aeronautics and graduated with a degree in missile engineering, Gismondi changed trajectory in 1959 when he founded Artemide with established Milanese architect and industrial designer Sergio Mazza to design and manufacture quality lighting Mazza drew the company ’ s first products but other architects and industrial designers were soon commissioned to expand its range, and in 1971 Gismondi asked expatriate German Richard Sapper to design a desktop work lamp

Born in Munich, Sapper had started his design career at Mercedes-Benz before relocating to Milan in 1958, where he sprang to international attention in the 1960s with his work for electronics company Brionvega, especially with the still-in-production 1963 cult classic TS 502 cube radio (Octane 102).

Although Tizio was commissioned by Gismondi, the real client turned out to be Sapper himself, who later declared that he’d wanted a lamp with a light source that could easily be positioned close to his drawing hand with the least possible obstruction to his vision. The skeletal matt black aluminium result featured pivoted and counterbalanced parallel arms and a lamp head that could be repositioned by the touch of a finger.

Multi-positional lamps were not exactly a new idea, of course, the world-famous

Anglepoise (Octane 10) having arrived in 1932, the year Sapper was born, but the Tizio cleverly exploited modern technology to produce a delicate, low-inertia lightweight design masterpiece It dispensed with springs tomaintainthelight’spositionandevenacable to carry electricity to the bulb It was this last feature – the absence of any obvious means of conducting electricity – that made the lamp so novel and intriguing to the uninitiated

It was made possible by using a tiny 12-volt halogen bulb, then more common in 8mm amateur film projectors The low voltage allowed electricity to be carried through the arms from the transformer in the lamp’s base without fear of shock to the user In another thoughtful innovation, the pivot points of the flat-section arms were held by press-studs that in the event that the lamp was knocked over would give way before the arms bent.

The lack of a cable to the lamp head allowed the arms to rotate a full 360 degrees around their pivot points, as could the lamp head itself The heavy base containing the transformer also doubled as a turntable around which the superstructure could revolve

It was launched in 1972, just as matt black was about to become the new cool The allblack Porsche Design watch was launched in the same year and the brightwork on the 911 soon also turned black. Almost overnight, no self-respecting architect or ad-man would feel that his desk was complete without a Tizio. It became an immediate cult object of the loftliving, high-tech era then emerging, even to those who could merely aspire to a loft rather than actually being able to afford one.

Other, distinctly architecty finishes such as white and metallic grey subsequently became available and, after half a century, the appeal of Tizio is undimmed. Design purists, however, may not be convinced by the fact that to celebrate its 50th year of production it is now available in red. Sapper died on the last day of 2015 and Gismondi on the last day of 2020 and, despite the commemoration Tizio being describedas‘InSapper’sfavouriteshadeofred’, one suspects neither would have approved.