Flos

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. ...

When Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby announced on 20 May 2026 that their London studio would close after 30 years, they ended a partnership that put one product into the hands of 8,000 Olympic torchbearers and another under millions of office workers. The question this piece sets out to answer is the simplest one anybody asks after such an announcement: what, exactly, did Barber Osgerby make between 1996 and 2026? The answer is roughly four dozen products of consequence, spread across a tight roster of manufacturers — Vitra, Flos, Cappellini, B&B Italia, Established & Sons, Knoll, Hermès, Isokon Plus, Mutina, Fredericia and Emeco — plus one Olympic torch, one circulating coin, and two sister practices that outlived the founding studio in different corporate hands. What follows is that catalogue, in order. ...

On 22 May 2026, the 29th Compasso d’Oro jury — chaired by Jasper Morrison under ADI president Luciano Galimberti — handed Italy’s design Oscar to 20 projects at the ADI Design Museum in Milan. The compasso d’oro 2026 winners include Philippe Malouin’s Bilboquet table lamp for Flos and Snøhetta’s Array modular sofa for MDF Italia, while Patrizia Moroso of Moroso took the products career award alongside three more lifetime laurels — Alberto Meda and Paola Lenti for design, Aldo Colonetti for research. Thirty-eight honourable mentions and three long-selling products round out a roll call that this year reads less like a national survey and more like a refereed argument about what Italian industrial design currently rewards: mass-market objects with a clear authorial signature, infrastructure and mobility projects with measurable social weight, and historical research that pays its rent. ...

Barber Osgerby designs span thirty years and ten manufacturers, and on 20 May 2026 Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby confirmed in interviews to mark the closure of their London studio that the catalogue is now closed. The partnership that began in 1996 with a bent-plywood low table for Isokon Plus ends in the same week that their Triennale Milano retrospective, Alphabet, comes down — a roster that runs through the Loop Table, the Tab Light for Flos, the Iris Table for Established & Sons, the Tip Ton chair for Vitra, and the London 2012 Olympic Torch. The Barber Osgerby designs that defined the last three decades of British industrial design are not being withdrawn; the practice is. The majority of the pieces shown at the Triennale remain in production, which is the answer to most of the questions readers will ask first. ...