Artemide’s Stellar Nebula Gleams like a Floating Soap Bubble

Stellar Nebula. Courtesy of Artemide

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June 16, 2022

Read more from Salone del Mobile 2022.

Artemide tends to be one of Sixtysix’s favorite stops during Salone del Mobile—and this year proved no different. New technologies met old favorites with the sanitary light of Integralis, introduced in 2021, finding a new place in Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina’s Tolomeo lamp from 1987. But our favorite is certainly the completion of the Stellar Nebula family of lamps designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

In Stellar Nebula, innovative finishing techniques give the glass diffusers a rainbow glimmer, resembling a soap bubble in the light. BIG designed the lamp to allow the instinctive, ancient combination of blown glass and light to achieve new dimensions with today’s industrial finishing technologies.

“The Stellar Nebula lamps show off Artemide’s skill in the glassblowing field. The lamps celebrate the artistic freedom of the glassblower, adding a personal touch to each piece,” says Jakob Lange from BIG. Each handcrafted piece is blown into a standard mold by a master glassmaker in Venice, who then softly reshapes the piece to be unique. The lamps come in three standard sizes, but each shape is not quite like the one before.

The glass then is treated with an innovative dichroic finishing process that gives it the sudsy sheen, bringing artisan techniques and industrial production together. Because each lamp is slightly different in shape, its surface gleams in a manner unlike any other.

Stellar Nebula Table Lamp. Courtesy of Artemide

The Stellar Nebula family is complete with two clusters, a floor lamp, table lamp, and ceiling lamp made in the medium size. The new table lamp has a transparent glass ring base for the always-differing glass diffusers to rest upon. Due to their shape and shine, they still appear to be somehow floating, drifting downward to rest on the ring as the light reflects and filters through the glass.

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