Live Tour of the Manzoni

Live Tour of the Manzoni

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Live Tour of the Manzoni

Tom gives an Instagram live tour of the Manzoni, taking you on a journey around the multiple rooms, each with unique narratives. He also presents the latest collections.

 

Tom Dixon via Instagram Live takes you around The Manzoni, our restaurant and exhibition space in Milan.

Introducing Luminosity, our theme for the first stop on the Grand Tour. Featuring new PRESS lighting, MELT chandeliers and Black Light (In collaboration with Valextra and Prolicht.

 

 

Tom Dixon: Hi, welcome to Milan where I'm standing in Via Manzoni which is in the heart of the city. The Scala's over there, the Duomo's just beyond, and here we have our Restaurant: Manzoni 5.

So what we decided a couple of years ago was, instead of finding kind of crazy spaces, we wanted somewhere permanent and so we're here. First, you can see, we've got a bar. Hanging above the bar are the Smoke Melt lamps and we're presenting, in this theme of Luminosity, some new lamps. These are the Press lamps and they're really an attempt to make the most luminous lights that we can. Heavy pressed glass following on from the Press accessories that we were doing last year. So now we're bringing that into Lighting as well. We wanted to make something that was hyper-heavyweight, long lasting and super lumionous as well.

So here the restaurant is the placed where we launched the Fat chair and where we've done these amazing chandeliers out of the Melt lamps which have just been converted into integrated LEDs which allow us to really pump out a lot more light.

Here we go into the next body of the restaurant. See the rotating Spring lamps up here which act almost as fans to move the air, and here people dining in the restaurant. So what's been so nice about having a restaurant in Milan is that we can entertain people properly. They can sit down, they can spend two or three hours with us and get away from the madness that is Milan.

So here we see a few more new objects: The Melt Chandelier that we first showed at the Sydney Opera House now reconfigured to be a hanging chandelier rather than a standing one, and what I wanted to do was to show you not just the restaurant, but also take you to an exhibition outside with our next door neighbours in the shop - the fashion store - called Valextra, solet's walk this way.

So what was amazing about having this place here was that really we've been able to have a permanent home in Milan and start really investing in this capital of design which has been so phenomenally important in my development as a designer, but also it's the heartbeat of the design industry, so seeing it come alive again has been really good because after two years of Zoom and two years of just being virtual we're suddenly seeing all the tastes and the smells and the textures of design coming back together.

So here at Valextra is the Luminosity show even more expressed in a more minimal way in this John Pawson interior where we can see our collaboration with a company called Prolicht which is a techincal lighting company based in Austria where we've created a series of lumious sculptures from this track system which is just a magnetic circuit board which can be configured and reconfigured to make endless amounts of sculpture. So I wanted to show you a few more of these objects starting with this column here which is where we take the track system from the ceiling and we make a sculpture out of it. These huge orbs which make the track system three dimensional, and then as we go further into the shop you'll see the square component which compliments the round one where we've started to make things out of just these two circuit boards. Really celebrating the beauty of the engine that really powers the modern world. Circuit board is everywhere but really they're not shown in their pure form so this is just circuit board. So you see the square used here and then the square used in a variety of more extravagant ways with this luminous object here which is really reminiscent of the masters of Italian design like Sosass, but reconfigured in a completely new materiality. And this piece here which is really fifty-six thousand LEDs in one piece which means it's incredibly bright whereas you can see it doesn't really have a lot of glare, and this is really probably taking you back to the beginning of artificial light when the first lightbulbs appeared - people were so proud of the object they showed the bulb naked, and I think that's sort of the sensibility I want to get back to.

So that's Luminosity which is our big this year in Milan and really our prescence here is really talking about the power of light which really is the thing that makes us survive.

So back into the sunlight in Milan. It's kind of great to be back, and so join us back at The Manzoni when you can. We'll be back here in - I think we'll be back here in April, right?

Am I saying goodbye? Thank you!