The Origin

Foscarini Headquarters in Italy

The origins in the twin context of the Murano glass industry and the culture of the design project

Foscarini was founded in 1981 to produce lighting fixtures for the contract sector: hotels, stores, offices and public spaces. On the Venetian island of Murano, in particular during the Seventies, a significant industry grew parallel to the traditional blown glass production, supplying custom contract work for large architectural projects in prevalently emerging countries such as the Arab countries. A production that was economically very profitable, but frequently more significant in terms of quantity than design or manufacturing quality. Unlike the majority of Murano manufacturers, Foscarini combined the use of various blown glass techniques with a specific attention to the technical lighting characteristics. Glass, but conceived for lighting: a choice which carried precise implications for the design project, and was directed at building a product-oriented culture, in the best tradition of Italian design.

Not that there was a lack of manufacturers who produced quality lamps in blown glass, though this rarely constituted their main source of production, but like Venini or Vistosi they were often distinguished by ancient tradition and obvious prestige, having long become accustomed to collaborating with important Italian and foreign designers.

This is not the place to develop an articulated essay on the relationship that Italian design maintained with the productive techniques of traditional craft industries.

The theories of industrial design have always correctly tended towards standardized production, large quantities, mechanized standardization; but the dialogue between the world of design and different techniques of execution, hand-crafting, semi-handcrafting, and semi-mechanization, has never diminished throughout history, leading to research, experimentation and stunning results. Similarly, in theory and in practice, there has been a constant reduction over time in the central role of the series, the significantly large production quantity, in favor of the one-of-a-kind or limited edition piece. Italian design, and especially, and fortunately, its protagonists, has expressed many different spirits and interests, including experimentation with different production methods that are not industrial. If there is one distinction to be made, it concerns the need to separate designing and making, otherwise we are speaking of crafts tout court: if a project exists, methods and production numbers do not always have to be considered major constraints.

Over the course of the Twentieth century, blown glass has been one of the most interesting “venues”, physically and culturally, for the dialogue between a modern design conception and an ancient and almost entirely manual production technique. Sometimes, during the past century, significant encounters occurred between designers, glassblowers and manufacturers on Murano; in other cases the same glasshouses created significant products in terms of design. In several situations, attempts were made to redirect the traditional production of Murano glass more consistently towards more industrialized styles, not always with satisfactory results, and towards more up-to-date distribution, marketing and communication models: this occurred in many large glasshouses, light design companies, small manufacturers or self-production interests.

This was undoubtedly a quest for a more complex and articulated balance, focused on the present without losing sight of history, that still appears as a necessity today, to provide renewed vigor to a context and to glass manufacturers who have become less vital over time.

Compared to the majority of companies on Murano, Foscarini originated with a specificity, a basic “weakness” resulting from a specific choice and revealing itself over time to be a fundamental resource. It does not in fact own its own furnace, nor does it produce itself, but turns each time to more or less mechanized craftsmen, or to industry, creating all the necessary conditions to make its own lamps. This practice of using suppliers divided by technology, materials and production has now become rather common in the era of the tertiary and market globalization8, but in the early Eighties it certainly was not, especially for those who worked on Murano. This constraint-opportunity, constituted by the condition of being a design firm “without a furnace”, favored a mental approach which tended towards total flexibility and freedom, particularly in the search for the most appropriate solution to a design problem, followed by the identification of the most appropriate technological and manufacturing techniques and consequently the most suitable producer.

A problem-solving methodology which over time proved functional to sustaining the research conducted with the designers into a variety of materials and techniques.

Starting in 1982, Foscarini complemented its contract production, cautiously at first and later in an increasingly convinced and convincing manner, with a standardized production. It initially served to integrate the company’s production and sales cycle during the moments of cyclical contraction and dilution of contract commissions; over time the catalog production grew increasingly important until it completely replaced custom and made to order furnishings, abandoned during the early Nineties.

The standard production was stimulated from the very beginning by Carlo Urbinati and Alessandro Vecchiato9, employees who later became the owners of the company, and personally took responsibility for the entire manufacturing cycle: from the design, to the engineering, to the search for the glass manufacturers, to the visual communication and marketing strategy.

The first phase of production conjugated two directions: on one hand the techniques for blowing Murano glass, on the other the attempt to make them dialogue with contemporary design culture. These were lamps which dedicated specific attention to the principles of lighting and made constant reference to the masters and the manufacturers of light design.

Fixtures in blown glass that made light, for which they conceived original solutions that often challenged the glassblowers and forced them into directions which were new to them. Lamps with clean and simple shapes, often distinguished by movement or mechanical solutions, which used glass for the quality of the material and its colors, attempting to go beyond a purely decorative configuration or surface treatment.