Senior Product Designer

In the 1960s, the Italian artist and inventor Bruno Munari was studying spontaneous forms: shapes that emerge from the interaction of material, function, and environment.

When Danese Milano commissioned him to design a lamp that was practical, durable, affordable, and easy to transport, Munari was reminded of the traditional rice paper lanterns he had encountered when traveling in Japan. But rice paper lanterns are fragile, hard to clean, and tend to yellow over time.

Looking for an industrial alternative, he discovered filanca—a synthetic stretch nylon used exclusively for women's stockings at the time.

Munari visited hosiery factories to test the material and see what forms it could take. "We do not make lamps, sir. Only stockings," one factory told him. Munari replied, "You'll see."

The result was the Falkland lamp: only a few centimeters thick when packaged, as tall as a human when hung, its spontaneous form emerging from the elasticity of the nylon and metal rings of different diameters inserted at regular intervals, enlarged by gravity when suspended from above.

Munari didn't begin with the form of a lamp. He began with the qualities it n