To-Tie by Guglielmo Poletti awarded with an honorable mention at the Compasso d’Oro

9 October 2024

Guglielmo Poletti tells how the project for the To-Tie lamp by Flos was born and evolved, and awarded this year with an honorable mention at the ADI Compasso d’Oro. And in his narration, in a very elegant way, he willingly underlines the importance of the intense dialogue with the company’s technical office that was able to give strength and structure to his initial idea. Poletti started from an input but was able to enrich and modify it in a design research path that also passed through the Flos archives.

What does the honorable mention of the Compasso d’Oro for To-Tie represent for you?

Receiving the honorable mention of such a historically prestigious award as the Compasso d’Oro was a great honor for me, partly unexpected since To-Tie was my first industrial lighting project. 

I am grateful to a large company like Flos for giving me the opportunity to develop this product together, the result of the collaboration between so many figures with exceptional know-how. This second aspect represents for me a further privilege, which makes this recognition even more significant.

How did the concept of this lamp come about?

To-Tie was born from a design digression: the original idea started from the joint of a table part of the Equilibrium collection, my thesis work developed during the Master at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, focused on structural tension. Initially, I reworked the various elements by presenting a pendant lamp, of which Flos made a first prototype. But that prototype, for many reasons, was not good.

It was then that I saw in the company a product by Achille Castiglioni from 1975, Aoy, a cylindrical glass table lamp. This gave me the opportunity to rethink my idea, creating a new prototype of To-Tie in the table version: a small acrylic cylinder and a metal tube with a very simple LED inside, all held together by a tensioned cord. Although it was a very rudimentary model, putting together that first version of the lamp in my laboratory was a fundamental step in understanding its potential and lighting qualities. I didn’t conceive this lamp rationally; it was the process that did it for me.

Did you receive any input from the company when designing it?

The dialogue with Flos began without any specific initial brief. I really appreciated the freedom that was granted to me, which gave me the opportunity to work independently on various proposals right from the start. But it was during the development phase that I received the most important input from the company, thanks to the constant dialogue and the unparalleled technical skills deriving from Flos’s cultural and design heritage. Although the process was very linear, it took a year and a half to perfect it: it is the meticulous attention to detail that makes To-Tie a Flos lamp, both from a technical and aesthetic point of view.

How is To-Tie assembled?

To-Tie is a bare object, made of almost nothing, whose aesthetics are subordinated to a clear constructive logic. Its distinctive feature is summarized in its name, which in English means to tie, to fix. The construction of the lamp connects three simple elements: cable, bar and cylinder. The key to the project lies in the tensioning system, which outlines both the formal and functional qualities of the lamp, uniting them in a reciprocal bond. The components, reduced to the bare minimum and assembled only thanks to mechanical tension, perform multiple functions. The light source is integrated into an anodized aluminum bar that not only emits light, but also acts as a handle to lift the lamp. Similarly, the fabric electric cable, in addition to supplying power to the bar, allows the latter to be fixed to the borosilicate glass cylinder, whose extreme clarity highlights the geometric composition of the joint. The assembly method without screws, glue or welding, allows the lamps to be easily disassembled to replace the components or to dispose of them correctly, facilitating the recycling process at the end of the product’s life.

Essentiality and symmetry are recurring features in your projects: where does this aspect come from?

In my work, purity and formal rigor are recurring features as they are linked to research focused on precise structural gestures, aimed at investigating and enhancing the properties of the materials. Both the functional and formal qualities of a project are often the result of constructive considerations, which allow to reduce in a certain sense the level of arbitrariness related to design choices, denoting at the same time the aesthetic value of the project. In this perspective, essentiality often becomes the key to dictating a compositional hierarchy, allowing a single detail to emerge to become the characterizing element of an object or, equally, of a space.

Photo credits: Bea De Giacomo

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