Oluce - Acrilica Portoro marble table lamp

Coupé originated in 1967 from the creative intuition of Joe Colombo, who initially designed it as a variation on a lamp already in the company’s collection, the Spider, retaining its base and stem. Starting from these bold, simple features – the base, the stem and the adjustable cover serving as a shade – the designer created one of Oluce‘s best-known families.

This year, having offered the Coupé in a variety of different models and finishes over the years, Oluce is expanding the family with the introduction of Mini Coupé, a smaller scale version of the table lamp, available in a stunning new contemporary range of colours. At 34 cm in height and in brand new colours, the Mini Coupé wittily maintains all the vigour common to Joe Colombo’s designs of the 60s, a time when design aimed to fulfil a function while also making an aesthetic statement, when experimentation with new materials, use of colour, movement, and the desire to break new ground were the guiding lights of his creations.

The Mini Coupé, with its chrome stem and semi-cylindrical shade, retains the distinctive profile and bold character which define the Coupé collection and which have always made it an exceptionally modern lighting range, now even more complete.

As a testament to its international success, it won the International Design Award from the American Institute of Interior Designers in Chicago the year after its creation and is included in the permanent collection of both the MoMA in New York and the Neue Sammlung Museum in Munich.

Joe Colombo

Telling Joe Colombo means telling the short and intense story of one of the greatest Italian designers, who died in 1971, at only 41 years old. The lightning-fast life of a man who strongly believed in the future and who, just in those fundamental '60s when the future suddenly began to seem close, gave us a very particular foreshadowing. Joe Colombo then designed entire cockpits. First of all, per la Bayer, il Visiona ’69, cellula integrata definita da differenti ”stazioni funzionali”: il blocco ”Night-Cell” (letto+armadiature+bagno), il ”Kitchen-Box” (cucina+pranzo), il ”Central-Living” (soggiorno). Functional stations articulated both in plan and in section, as on the other hand happened daily in the houses designed by Joe Colombo, where the floors and ceilings went up and down in a continuous acceleration and slowing of the internal dynamism, where the bookcases were suspended high and the lights recessed to the floor.
Telling Joe Colombo then means telling someone for whom research always crossed, on the one hand in artistic research (just think of the extraordinary Acrylic lamp and its relationships with kinetic and programmed experiences), on the other in scientific research (It is certainly the one on the application of new materials and new technologies: we have already said about halogen light, so let’s think about injection molding - the very famous chair for Kartell in 1968).
And many things could still be said by telling Joe Colombo, but above all the poignant observation prevails that the short years "of fantasy in power" were also the brief magical years of Joe Colombo. Fate prevented us from knowing what this visionary genius would do in the dark period that followed. Still today, however, twenty-five years later, many of its products, then futures, live alongside us every day, continuing to tell us about a better future.

Oluce

Founded in 1945, Oluce is the oldest Italian design company in the illumination sector still in operation today. The design qualities of the lamps make them icons that communicate across the generations to become an integral part of the homes they furnish.Thanks to their expressive power, the iconic forms of products made by Oluce articulate a visual grammar that becomes a narrative. Stories, suggestions, emotions are revealed through the profile of the lamps.
During its history, the company has received numerous awards, including two Compassi d'Oro, two Design Awards and the Gold Medal at the XIII Milan Triennale. Its lamps appear in the world's most important permanent design collections.