Accademia Table Lamp by Cini Boeri for Artemide, 1970s

Born in 1924 in Milan, Cini Boeri is an award-winning industrial designer, architect, and interior designer. Along with Gae Aulenti, she was one of the few female Italian designers to enjoy international success in the postwar era. Her work has consistently underscored the psychological connection between humans and their environment.

After graduating from the Polytechnic University in Milan in 1951, she interned at Giò Ponti’s architectural firm before working for many years with designer Marco Zanuso. In 1963, Boeri founded her eponymous architecture studio, focusing on industrial design as well as civil architecture. She created many modern Italian design classics, including the Bobo Lounge (1967), which was the first exclusively foam Monobloc seat; the 602 Table Lamp (1968); the polyurethane Serpentone Lounge (1971) that was sold by the meter; the modular Strips Series (1972, awarded the Compasso D’Oro in 1979); the sculpted glass Cibi Tumbler (1973), the Ghost Armchair (1987 in collaboration with Tomu Katayanagi); and the Bortolo Chair (2014).

Over the course of her career, Boeri has collaborated with some of the biggest Italian and international brands including Arflex, Artemide, Rosenthal, Knoll, Magis , Venini, Fiam, Misawa Homes, Tre-P Tre-Piu, Tronconi, and Philips. Her most celebrated architectural projects include The Domestic Project, first exhibited at the 1986 Triennale; The Bunker House (1967) on the island of La Maddalena; Casa nel Bosco (1969) near Lago Maggiore; and the Apartment on Three Levels in central Milan (2006).

As well as winning the Compasso d’Oro for the Strip Series, Boeri has been the recipient of many prestigious international prizes, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles in 2008; she was nominated as an honorary member of ADI in 2012. She has held many esteemed positions at several international institutions and universities, including the Politecnico di Milano, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Lugano in Switzerland. Her work can be found in Milan Triennale Design Museum and New York's MoMA.

For more information about Boeri's unique design philosophy, check out The Human Dimension of Home Living (Franco Angeli: Milan, 1980).

* Images courtesy of Cini Boeri Architetti

Legendary Italian lighting manufacturer Artemide was founded in the Milan area in 1959 by engineer-designer Ernesto Gismondi (born in San Remo, 1931) and designer Sergio Mazza (born in Milan, 1931). Notably, the latter designed the company’s first successful product, the Alfa Lamp, a year prior to Artemide’s launch. Both founders went on to contribute designs to Artemide’s ever-evolving lines over the next several decades, alongside spearheading the company’s mission to develop distinctive, architecturally-driven lamps, pendants, and other fixtures in collaboration with major design talents from around the world.

Highlights from Artemide’s vast catalogue include Italian designer Vico Magistretti’s space-age Eclisse Lamp (1967) and German-Italian designer Richard Sapper’s minimal, halogen-lit Tizio Desk Lamp (1972), which has become one of the most popular workspace accessories ever produced. The 1980s saw the launch of the Tolomeo Lamp (1987), designed by Italians Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina, which quickly became an international symbol of the “Made in Italy” style that dominated design tastes at the end of the last century. Today, Artemide continues to commission high-tech, high-concept works—increasingly with a focus on sustainability—from notable international designers, such as Herzog & De Meuron, Naoto Fukasawa, Karim Rashid, and Zaha Hadid, among others. Through the decades, many of Artemide’s lighting designs have been awarded the prestigious Compasso d’Oro, with the company itself receiving a “Career Achievement” award in 1995

For more than 50 years, Artemide’s approach has set the pace for design innovation with well-researched products that often end up in the pages of design history books. Numerous pieces have been acquisitioned into museum collections around the world, from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica in Milan, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.