Euroluce 2019: Inside Milan’s Lighting Biennale

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

Euroluce only happens in odd years, which is what lets it behave the way it does: not a lighting aisle inside a bigger fair, but the whole of Fiera Milano Rho given over to how a room gets lit. In April 2019, that meant a Czech glassmaker sending visitors through a carousel of nearly eight thousand crystal spheres, a British studio pairing offcuts with technical ceramic, and a London installations studio that turns out to be the sculptural wing of one of Britain’s own traditional lighting houses.

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Euroluce ran from 9 to 14 April 2019 at Fiera Milano Rho, as part of the 58th edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano. It is a biennial exhibition, staged only in odd-numbered years, which is a deliberate structural choice: rather than folding lighting into the annual furniture fair as one category among many, Salone del Mobile gives it its own two-year cycle and, when its turn comes round, its own halls. Euroluce has run that way since 1976, and the 2019 edition brought together lighting brands from outdoor, indoor and industrial categories alongside home automation and control systems, drawing an international mix of manufacturers, designers and specifiers to west Milan for six days.

What follows is not a list of everything on show, because nothing built from a fair the size of Salone del Mobile could honestly claim to be. It is a closer look at five stands that took genuinely different approaches to the same question: what does light do, physically, in a room. A Czech crystal manufacturer built something you walk through. A British studio built something made largely from what would otherwise be thrown away. A London installations team turned out, on closer inspection, to belong to a much older lighting house. Between them, they cover most of the design territory Euroluce exists to survey.

Preciosa’s Carousel of Light, and the two installations either side of it

Preciosa, the Czech crystal and lighting group based in Jablonec nad Nisou, built its 2019 stand around three linked pieces rather than one showpiece. The centrepiece, Carousel of Light, suspended almost 8,000 spheres in opal, amber, clear and pink frosted glass across an eight-metre diameter, arranged around a slowly rotating platform. Visitors could walk the strands of spheres themselves or ride the platform through them, and the lights above responded to movement, fading in and out as people passed beneath. According to Michael Vasku, creative director for Preciosa Lighting, the piece grew out of the company’s Pearl Curtain design, and was conceived as an interpretation of “the gentle movements and folds of a rich, luxurious fabric, such as the draping or layering of curtains” rendered in glass rather than cloth.

Either side of it stood two smaller pieces that did different jobs. Pearl Wave arranged 700 opal spheres into the shape of a breaking wave, a static composition built for line rather than interaction. Breath of Light, by contrast, was the interactive piece on the stand: visitors were invited to breathe into a sensor, and the installation’s own cluster of illuminated spheres responded, a considerably more literal way of connecting a person’s presence to the light in front of them than the ambient movement-sensing built into the Carousel. Taken together, the three pieces demonstrate the range Preciosa was showing off at Euroluce: monumental scale, quiet composition and directly responsive interaction, all built from the same material vocabulary of blown and moulded glass spheres that the company’s Jablonec workshops have specialised in since the region’s chandelier trade reached its height in the nineteenth century.

Lasvit’s Theory of Light, and the four designers behind it

Lasvit, the Czech glassmaker founded in 2007 by Leon Jakimič, used Euroluce 2019 to present The Theory of Light, a concept installation built from four separate pieces, each exploring a different physical property of light and each the work of a different, named designer.

De-Lux-Ity, by Wanda Valihrachová, captured the colour spectrum in glass, pairing a luxury material with a street-art sensibility. Aura, by Mária Čulenová, used hand-blown glass to trace the phases of the moon, working with reflection rather than colour. Liana, designed by Maxim Velčovský, took the form of a metal-net structure resembling tropical vines, drawing on bioluminescent organisms and built to adapt to different spaces rather than sit as a fixed object. Traces, by Katarína Fulínová and Kateřina Handlová, was the interactive piece in the set: an installation that turned viewers into co-creators, converting movement and emotion into colour as they engaged with it.

That the four pieces sit under a single title and a single Lasvit stand tends to flatten them into one story in most coverage of the fair. They were, in fact, four separate authored works, produced by five different designers working on reflection, perception, the light spectrum and the natural world as four distinct problems. It is a useful way to see how a glassmaker the scale of Lasvit actually operates: not as a single house style applied to every commission, but as a workshop capable of producing under one concept the work of several designers with genuinely different starting points, from Velčovský’s organic metalwork to Valihrachová’s spectrum studies. Lasvit has built a reputation doing exactly this kind of large-scale bespoke glass installation work for hospitality and corporate interiors since Jakimič founded the company in the northern Bohemian glassmaking region in 2007, and Euroluce 2019 was as much a demonstration of that range as it was a single showpiece.

Tala’s Magma and Alumina, and what “upcycled” actually meant on the stand

Tala, the British lighting brand founded in London by Joshua Ward and his co-founders in 2015, used Euroluce 2019 to launch two collections that took opposite routes to the same low-impact brief.

Magma was built from upcycled material, chosen specifically to soften and diffuse the light passing through it, and was designed to work alongside Tala’s own dim-to-warm light source, launched under the Sphere name. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate consideration bolted onto a finished design, the collection made the reclaimed material itself the thing doing the visual work: the texture and translucency of the piece is a direct consequence of what it is made from, not a finish applied afterwards. Alumina, shown alongside it, took a different route to the same durability question. It is built from a high-grade technical ceramic normally reserved for industrial applications, chosen because ceramic of that grade is resistant to knocks and wear in a way that makes it suitable for a genuinely portable fitting, aimed at what Tala described as “life on the move” rather than a fixed domestic installation. Tala’s founders have said their starting premise was that good design was the fastest practical route to a lower-carbon home, and the two 2019 collections are a reasonably direct illustration of that idea in practice: one collection making the case through material reuse, the other through a component built to outlast the product category it usually belongs to.

LUUM’s Samara and Bangle LED, and the workshop standing behind them

LUUM, showing from London, presented the Samara collection, a series of geometric brass forms built to work as much with the shadow they throw as with the light they emit, alongside Bangle LED, a large-scale installation drawing its form directly from contemporary jewellery.

What most coverage of the stand left unsaid is where LUUM actually sits within the wider lighting industry. It is not, on its own, an independent London studio in the way its Euroluce presence might suggest. LUUM is the dedicated installations studio of Heathfield & Co, the British lighting house, established in 2015 under creative director Chris Fox to produce sculptural, large-scale work commissioned for hospitality, commercial and residential interiors, sitting alongside Heathfield & Co’s own collection of contemporary light fittings. Seen that way, the Samara and Bangle LED pieces at Euroluce 2019 were not a small studio’s independent debut but a demonstration stand for a British manufacturer’s installations arm, built specifically to show architects and interior designers what a bespoke commission from that workshop could look like at full scale. It is a structure fairly common in British lighting manufacturing, where a heritage fittings business runs a separate, more experimental studio under its own name, and it explains why LUUM’s work reads as considerably more sculptural and less catalogue-bound than most stands built around a single product range.

Swarovski’s Crystal Palace, four elements deep

Swarovski, the Austrian crystal manufacturer, has treated Milan design week as a recurring platform for its Crystal Palace concept for well over a decade, and the 2019 edition organised its stand around four elements, air, water, earth and fire, the components of crystal manufacturing itself, curated by visual storyteller Marcel van Doorn. At the centre of the stand stood Anima Mirage, a bespoke installation in brushed gold, frosted glass and crystal that Swarovski described as reacting to movement, positioned as what the brand called a fifth element.

Around it sat two lighting collections carrying the design work. Luminous Reflections, designed by Tord Boontje, used smooth, unfaceted crystal components to mimic the rippled effect of sunlight on water, extended in 2019 with new pendant and table lamp formats. Cyanometer, by Marjan van Aubel, used white opal crystal in minimalist floor, ceiling and wall fixtures that shifted gently between blues, pinks and reds across the day, a much quieter proposition than the central installation. Both collections connected to a companion app that let visitors select preset light effects or build their own, extending Swarovski’s stand beyond static display and into something closer to a working demonstration of the crystal collections in domestic use.

What Euroluce’s biennial structure is actually for

It is worth pausing on why Euroluce runs the way it does, because the structure explains why the fair produces installations at this scale rather than simply a lot of new products. Salone del Mobile stages its specialist sections, Euroluce among them, on a two-year rotation rather than every year, which means a lighting brand exhibiting at Euroluce is not refreshing a stand annually. It is building toward a single moment every other spring, and the gap shows in the ambition of what turns up: a walk-through installation of nearly 8,000 crystal spheres, or a four-designer concept installation, is the kind of project a brand commits real budget and lead time to precisely because it only gets the platform once every two years. That is also why Euroluce sits comfortably alongside the furniture-only years of Salone del Mobile rather than competing with them for attention: the fair’s organisers treat lighting as a discipline that deserves its own dedicated edition rather than a permanent corner of a broader show, and the 2019 stands, from Preciosa’s crystal architecture to Tala’s ceramic and reclaimed material work, were built on that assumption.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read a Euroluce stand list as a catalogue: this many spheres, this collection, this material. What the five stands covered here actually show is a set of different answers to the same design brief, working in materials, form and interactivity all at once. Preciosa demonstrated that scale and interaction are not opposites, building a single stand that ran from a static wave of opal spheres to a carousel that responded to where visitors chose to walk. Lasvit showed that a concept installation can still be four individually authored works rather than one house style stretched across a stand. Tala and LUUM made the same case from opposite directions, one proving that reclaimed material and industrial ceramic can carry a domestic lighting brief, the other revealing that a sculptural installation studio can sit quietly inside a much older manufacturing business. Swarovski, running its Crystal Palace platform for another edition, kept faith with the idea that a fair this size still has room for a single crystal installation to anchor an entire stand.

Euroluce’s two-year gap between editions is what makes that ambition possible. A fair returning every year rewards incremental updates. One returning every other spring rewards the kind of project that takes two years to justify, which is precisely what Preciosa’s carousel, Lasvit’s four-designer installation and Swarovski’s Anima Mirage all were. That is the argument the 2019 edition made, stand by stand: given room to build toward a single moment rather than a permanent presence, a lighting brand will use it.