Flos Arco

The Arco is a floor lamp that behaves like a ceiling light. A long arc of brushed stainless steel rises from a block of white Carrara marble, curves through the air and comes down more than two metres away, ending in a domed reflector of polished, perforated aluminium. The reflector swivels, and the arc's height can be adjusted. The marble, about sixty-five kilos of it, is the counterweight, and a hole drilled through it lets the block be carried on a pole.

Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed it in 1962 for Flos, a company founded in Merano that same year. Flos says they took the idea from street lighting: a lamp on a long arm, brought indoors, so that a dining table could be lit from above without a fitting in the ceiling. In the same year they designed the Toio floor lamp for Flos, built around a car headlamp, and the two lamps were among the young company's first products.

The lamp became one of the best-known pieces of Italian design. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has appeared in films, Finnish Design Shop notes, including Diamonds Are Forever and The Italian Job. It was copied so often that Flos went to court over one imitation. In 2020 the Compasso d'Oro created a new award for designs that had proved themselves over decades, and the Arco was among the first three to receive it.

Flos has made the Arco since 1962 without a break, and it has hardly changed. The company now offers a version with an LED source as well as the original with a conventional bulb. Both keep the marble block, the steel arc and the polished dome, at 2.4 metres high. Flos sells the LED model from its own shop for £2,397, more than sixty years after the first.