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From a fog-soaked ferry in 1981 to a constellation of global studios—and one very bendy floor lamp.
I still remember my first January trip to Murano—fog everywhere, furnaces glowing like coals under a wet blanket. The late boat back to Venice was half empty except for two men guarding a drawing tube. One, a young engineer named Carlo Urbinati, kept apologizing when the tube rolled into my seat; the other, Alessandro Vecchiato, simply laughed and offered me a cigarette he’d forgotten to light. Foscarini, they said, was “a newborn—appena nato.” They were renting kiln hours, making lobby chandeliers, and praying the hotel trade wouldn’t tank.
“We’re not married to glass,” Vecchiato told me later. “We’re married to luce, the stuff inside the glass.” Se non rischi, non cresci—if you don’t risk, you don’t grow.
That line still sits, scribbled in pencil, on the first page of Foscarini’s original project ledger.
Lumiere table lamp (Rodolfo Dordoni, 1990). Foscarini’s first breakout piece, pairing a blown-glass shade with an aluminum tripod. Photo © Foscarini / Gianluca Vassallo.
1988 – 1994 · Cutting Loose from Contract
By ’88 the partners were restless. They sold a warehouse’s worth of chandelier parts, left the island for Mestre, and posted a hand-typed notice: “Designers wanted—bring ideas, not résumés.” Rodolfo Dordoni arrived first, balancing a paper cone on three chopsticks. The sketch morphed into Lumiere (1990): blown-glass shade, aluminum tripod. The lamp’s first run sold out in six weeks; overnight, Foscarini lighting meant you could mix Murano craft with metal and still feel Italian.
Two years later a CAD file dropped into the fax tray: Jozeph Forakis’s Havana pendant, a polyethylene cigar that shed warm, even light. By ’93 it hung in cafés from Milan to Melbourne; MoMA grabbed one for its permanent collection, proof that Italian lighting fixtures could ditch crystal and stay relevant.
Mite floor lamp (Marc Sadler, 2001) in carbon-Kevlar composite—first lamp to win the Compasso d’Oro. Photo © Foscarini.
1995 – 2004 · Kevlar, Carbon, and a Compasso d’Oro
Then came Marc Sadler with a question no one had asked: “What if the lamp is the filament’s armor?” He and Foscarini engineers wrapped carbon and Kevlar® around a slender bulb; the result, Mite (2001), weighed less than a liter of milk but stood taller than a barstool. It picked up a Compasso d’Oro and bumped Foscarini revenue an estimated 18 percent in the following year.¹
(Full disclosure: I once leaned too hard on a Mite prototype and left a fingerprint in the resin; Sadler called it ‘un souvenir.’)
Around the same time photographer Hélène Binet shot the catalog in a half-demolished Belgian mill. Fixtures looked like improvised instruments in an abandoned orchestra pit. Dealers grumbled; design students made mood boards.
Twiggy floor lamp (Marc Sadler, 2006). Fiberglass rod and counterweight system made this Foscarini’s global icon. Photo © Foscarini.
2005 – 2009 · Enter Twiggy, Exit Any Doubt
Euroluce 2005 felt like stand-up comedy. Sadler stepped on stage with what looked like a fishing rod, clicked it into a metal puck, clipped on a drum shade, and let the fiberglass arc snap forward. The shade hovered over a sofa, perfectly balanced. A stylist leaned in for a photo, the rod quivered, and—whack—her shin took the first unofficial field test. (No injury, plenty of laughter.)
That demo became Twiggy, now the go-to Foscarini floor lamp. A year later came Twiggy Outdoor, pushing Foscarini outdoor lighting into terraces that had never seen anything sleeker than a tiki torch.
Gregg Outdoor (L+R Palomba, 2011) demonstrates Foscarini’s shift to LED and dark-sky thinking. Photo © Foscarini
2010 – 2019 · Diesel, LEDs, and Dark-Sky Tactics
LEDs threatened everyone’s catalog. Foscarini rebuilt its hits around warm-tone diodes and launched Gregg Outdoor, Solar, Plena. Meanwhile the Diesel Living capsule arrived—rock-club rivets, acid-washed shades—and tilted the brand toward younger apartments. Packaging shed foam; boxes were stamped NO MARBLE, NO BLACK—half joke, half carbon audit. By 2018 Lumiere shipped in molded pulp and jute string.
Carlo Urbinati, president of Foscarini, outside the company’s Mestre HQ after announcing the 90 % acquisition of Ingo Maurer GmbH in 2022. Photo ©Foscarini.
2020 – 2024 · A Constellation, Not an Empire
In 2022 Foscarini quietly bought 90 percent of Ingo Maurer GmbH. Headlines warned of “absorption.” Urbinati shrugged: “We’re curating a constellation.” Both studios still design separately; they share only optics data and shipping lanes.
The fortieth-anniversary book, Some Think It’s Just About Shedding Light (2023), reproduces Urbinati’s ferry timetable—coffee rings, fares, doodles. New releases riff on classics: Twiggy Wood trades carbon for a veneer thin as cardstock, while solar bollards extend the foscarini outdoor lighting family into off-grid gardens. Engineers are beta-testing algae diffusers; if the color shift behaves, production starts in 2026.
Why the Ferry Still Runs
Urbinati still catches the late vaporetto when he can. “Engines that rumble help me think,” he once said, sketchbook balanced on a knee. One page—dated ’88—shows Lumiere’s tripod; another outlines a ceiling fan that may never see daylight. Design, he insists, is just the pretext: “La luce è la materia prima.”
Forty-plus years on, Foscarini remains the name architects drop when they want a fixture that behaves like furniture yet weighs no more than a clever sentence. That balancing act—risk and restraint—may be the company’s quietest legacy. You can bend a fishing rod across a living room and still call it home.
