Chiara

Flos – Mario Bellini, 1969

It was in 1969 that the Italian architect Mario Bellini designed Chiara, a flat delivered floor lamp made of a single rolled sheet with a shiny stainless steel coating. Fifty years after its introduction, Flos has reissued the icon by offering it in several sizes and finishes.

MARIO BELLINI: « One day in my studio it came to me that we could use light the way it manifests in our surroundings and our landscapes—never directly, but often through clouds or reflected off objects, walls, and surfaces. And so, instead of saying ‘let’s design a lamp’, I said, ‘let’s design an apparatus that can take light from an artificial source and send it back into our surroundings with a certain intelligence and grace’. Thinking about it was the easy bit, but then came the more difficult part: what do you do in a case like this? I took some scissors, a big piece of card, and I started to cut out something that could be made into a cylinder with a wide hat on top that, when joined on the right and left-hand side, would act as a reflector of the light source housed in the base. And that was it.

I always like to play around with words and their meanings. I am also a lover of etymology. Chiara means something clear, but the word clear is a word we use an awful lot in our language (‘let’s be clear’; ‘let’s clear this up’), and there are also certain Lombardy dialectal expressions for ‘to shed light’ that use the Italian word chiaro. Chiara is also the name of one of my daughters. »

Chiara F (Large)

Floor Lamp – H145 x 72 x Ø32 cm – 10,5 kg – Light source 1 x E27 – laser cut stainless steel, finished internally with an opaque white plastic film – The 1.9 m power cable has a dimmer switch to adjust the brightness. 

Chiara T (Small)

Table Lamp – H41 x 28 x Ø8,8 cm – 1,3 kg – Light source 1 x E14 – aluminium, finished internally with an opaque white plastic film – The 1.9 m power cable has a dimmer switch to adjust the brightness.