Castiglioni Objects: Flos and Zanotta, 1951-1971
Castiglioni objects between 1951 and 1971 are eleven domestic pieces — most of them still in production at Flos and Zanotta — that argued the readymade and the catalogue object could share a shelf without either losing its citizenship. The line begins in 1951 with Achille Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni drawing a linear fluorescent task lamp called Tubino for a Milanese lighting workshop that would soon be reorganised as Flos. It closes in 1971 with Achille and Pio Manzù tensioning a single steel cable between floor and ceiling, hanging a sliding bracket spotlight off it, and calling it Parentesi. In the twenty years between those two cables — a fluorescent tube and a steel tension wire — the brothers proposed that the household object could be assembled out of tractor seats, bicycle saddles, car headlamps and Carrara marble cylinders without ceasing to be furniture. ...