Beautiful homes for the majority

LUCEPLAN designs, manufactures and markets lighting appliances for residences, offices, community, government and agency buildings, indoor and outdoor environments.
Luceplan’s adventure was born from the design-oriented spirit of three young architects, among whom is Riccardo Sarfatti, who in 1978 decided to pursue the goal of “beautiful homes for the majority”, the slogan launched by the movement for modern architecture in Germany and Italy. The three young architects committed themselves to producing “beautiful objects for the majority”, the beautiful Luceplan lamps.

“BEAUTIFUL HOMES FOR THE MAJORITY”. CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT IT MEANS?
Beauty lies in the complexity of the productive cycle, where the designer’s creativity does play the important role of granting personality to the object, but there’s nothing more to it than being a role.
At Luceplan we have not embraced the idea of design as something whereby a product relies on its ability to generate great pathos and strong emotions, devoiding that very product of its intrinsic value. Love for the product quickly dies out, inexorably leading to excessive consumption and waste. It is fundamental, instead, to reflect upon that which is useful, that which tunes in with the environment where the person lives, that which has a clearly stated function.
This means making complexity simple.

WHAT ABOUT “FOR THE MAJORITY”?
Costs have to be limited by reducing the amount of unnecessary, purely decorative elements. All of which leads to more controlled production costs.
This means minimalising, which has nothing to do with the notion of minimal art. In this way, an object which is the final outcome of a lengthy designing process, defined as a design object, has a cost that is accessible to the majority of people.
Coming back to the issue of beauty, there is no one typology always holding good, since categories limit expressive abilities. It follows that any rational control over the productive cycle cannot do without the designer’s aesthetic view, which harmonises complexity.

INNOVATION, TO WHAT END?
In the face of the tragic events that occurred in the United States a year ago, self-criticism is totally lacking. I mean the kind of self-criticism that is capable of questioning our growth models, the very ones so faithfully pursued until today. Experimentation results from company restructuring after a 30-year-long growth cycle; in other words, we cannot continue to rely on the same production and sale systems we’ve been using till now.
Production will be bound to be oriented towards a more type of consumption awareness.

INNOVATION AND DESIGN?
There can be no design without innovation; lacking innovation, design turns into styling, mere formal exercising. I develop innovative concepts only when I account for various different fields of research and in each field I produce a certain quantum of innovation. The sum of these quantums turns into perceivable and comprehensible innovation. Even some objects which are seemingly simple in terms of their design and manufacturing, are actually the result of innovative efforts on the part of all those involved in the project.
Indeed, marketing should be one of these research quantums. Designers alone cannot raise themselves to the status of being the only ones to understand people’s needs. Personal experiences with light change continually and are different from one individual to the other; they need to be analysed in depth, and not only from an economic or market share-related point of view.
Truly, however, the international lighting appliances manufacturers wish to convince us that there is only one type of lighting, a homogenised one that fits all settings and activities. Instead, on the grounds of the complexity characterising every individual, there is the need for greater attention to be paid to individual requirements. This is what we are trying to do at Luceplan.