Born of Venice’s world-renowned glass blowing industry, art lighting manufacturer Andromeda International boasts an impressive portfolio of dramatic lighting schemes for hospitality, residential, retail, and cultural projects across the globe. To name just a few, they’ve created chandeliers for New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel; fixtures for Atlanta’s W hotel and the Grand Hyatt in Dubai; and lighting for Jean Paul Gaultier boutiques in Paris, Cannes, and New York.
Andromeda (a name shared by Greek mythology’s Ethiopian princess and by a northern star constellation) has high hopes for its impact: in a press release, it calls its work “beyond the established canons and classifications.” It considers its lighting installations nothing short of “inspirations which are gradually defining a new environment where art, design, and the highest manual skills dialogue.”
These kinds of lofty aspirations require talented teamwork, the likes of which are embodied in the company’s most recent project unveiled this winter in Rome. A swaying, shimmering luminosity, Fluxus is a glass and steel canopy suspended beneath a long sky light in the city’s new White Gallery, a multipurpose lifestyle store and contemporary art venue inside the restored Palazzo dell’Arte Moderna museum complex. In line with Andromeda’s focus on originality and advancement, the gallery is part of a wider master plan for developing Rome’s EUR business and residential quarter that includes a sculptural, cloud-like congress center by Massimiliano Fuksas Architetto and a mixed-use complex by Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
Fluxus could be hailed as the first completed work in this vast sea of innovation, and it has celebrity claims of its own: Karim Rashid designed the sculpture’s so-called “knit”, a series of 80,000 hand-made Murano glass loops woven together and hanging from a sort of grid of cross beams and mirrored, laser-cut steel tracks. According to Rashid, “Our living spaces and objects should ideally be organic, transformable, flexible and allow objects and furniture to breathe - to shape the personality of the space, and ‘knit’ is the fabric of light itself, to forever keep space dynamic, luxurious, and inspiring.”
Collaborating with Rashid, artist Michela Vianella conceptualized the wave’s shape and form, a suspended, sinuous canopy she describes as, “fluctuating, soft and enveloping, flowing between well defined points and lines to… achieve complete visual equilibrium.” Vianella, who has studied optics and kinetics, faded the 650 square feet of colored glass from white and through 3 shades of gray into black. Andromeda’s in house team developed the technology used to attach each loop to the grid, resulting in a hovering mass of steel and glass that weighs over 13,000 pounds. The entire canopy is backlit by a network of 5,000 tiny halogen lamps distributed across the wave’s upper surface.
The effect is stunning, especially when captured in the black and white imagery of photographer Cristiano Corte, selected by Andromeda president Gianluca Vecchi to document the entire project. Capturing the result of two years of research and seven months of development and installation, the documentation initiative, says Vecchi, narrates “the soul of Italian know-how in general and the world of the Murano glassworks in particular.”
This article is writen by Meghan Edwards is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Interior Design and Metropolis magazines. She has worked in Special Collections at Christie’s and presently holds a full-time editorial position at Interior Design. Born and raised in rural Washington State, she graduated from Brown University in 2006 with a BA in the History of Art and Architecture. Ms. Edwards has studied and worked in France and Portugal and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
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