– iconic Flos products are not only colorful but the instruments by which we experience color

the human brain perceives color as reflected light of varying spectral wavelength, associating it with personal and collective emotional responses – a phenomenom known as color-emotion synethesia

Flos – the Latin word for flower – is a symbol that, from bud to bloom, holds meaning. 05 3 pretted via code books, in late nineteenth-century Europe flowers were seen as a tangible representation of emotions, beginning the tradition of giving and receiving floral arrangements.

Intimately connected to flower varieties, color is yet another visual system that holds meaning across time and culture. Millions of years of biological and psychological conditioning

8 the calming blue of safe skies and seas, the exciting red of ripe berries, and the alerting bright colors of poisonous animals and plants – combined with modern traditions have created powerful associations between color stimuli and emotions, known as color-emotion synesthesia.

In the twentieth century, this phenomenom was investigated in the Western European and Amer ican fields of psychology. Data collected from color-emotion studies supports innate response theory, with a high degree of cross-cultural consensus on semantic terms relating to color, and linguistic metaphors and vocabulary in every language encouraging colors to be described as feeling states. Furthermore, if colors are bright and highly saturated, studies found that they will be reacted to as good and strong, meaning that characteristics 1, )1/13 8 such as brightness (value) and saturation (chroma) 8 are as determinant as hue (spectral wavelength).

Founded by Dino Gavina and Cesare Cassina in 1962, Flos is a cultural lighting company. Hav ing worked alongside design masters on furniture produced by a small Eisenkeil manufacturing facility in Merano, Italy, Gavina set his sights on designing lamp4 8 starting with the cocoon resin diffusers of the r u xTc (0 ccT, 1960, by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (0 5- c x , 1961, by Tobia Scarpa. In 1963, Sergio Gandini became the managing director 1, /14, driving the company’s creative fantasy and 3 /1)(ting production to the industrial district of Brescia in Lombardy, Northern Italy, where designers from Milan could experiment in a labora tory like environment thanks to the region’s wealth of professional schools, universities and con sequential manufacturing expertise. Also home to Salone Internazionale del Mobile, which was founded in 1961, the city of Milan influenced both national and international design. Avant-garde Milanese designers, nurtured by small-to-medium businesses, exhibition facilities and specialist design publications, pioneered the bold national mood and preferred colors that came to define the economic, social and political transformation of the Sixties and Seventies in post-war Italy. Domestic objects – seen as accessible expressions of modernity, lifestyle and taste – employed the primary colors, red, blue and yellow, and the secondary colors, green and orange signal from the work of industrial designers Joe Cesare Colombo and Vico Magistretti to architects Gae Aulenti, Gaetano Pesce and Mario Bellini, bold and direct color vocabularies triumphed.

Adapting a drawing dedicated by the widow of Italian industrial and automotive designer,

Pio Manzù, Castiglioni’s design 1, 5- r c x – named after the parenthesis symbol – describes a black, injection-molded elastomer pendant lamp 5-(5 moves vertically via a sliding, bracket-shaped steel tube on a four meter ceiling-to-floor steel cable, tensioned by a five kilogram weight that hovers above the floor. Born from Manzù’s original idea, but dramatically transformed in Castiglioni’s final design, Manzù’s son recalls Castiglioni’s decision to share its authorship as i xcur T r c r xa c cT, r c m u T Tr c Tu cs. Packaged .0 transparent, vacuum-molded plastic 8 made with the same technology Manzù used for pro motional cases and the display of mechanical parts at trade shows 8 the lamp was originally produced in black, white, nickel and exciting red – the national racing color of Italy since the