Artemide × Pirelli

Announced September 24, 1970, at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the Mescola took its name from the Italian word for a tyre compound. It grew out of a lunch between Ernesto Gismondi of Artemide and Pirelli's industrial products division, which was looking for a showcase for its new synthetic rubbers beyond hoses, flooring and tyres. Vico Magistretti, then working on Artemide's softer, rounder pieces, was given the brief in a single line: a lamp that cannot break.

Magistretti worked with Pirelli rubber technologist Aldo Ferrario at the Bicocca plant, and most of the decisions came from Ferrario's side of the table. The stem is a ribbed rubber hose from Pirelli's automotive range, stiffened with a spring steel spiral so it holds any position. The base is a thick disc of the same raised-stud flooring Pirelli supplied to airports and railway stations, moulded around a cast iron weight. The dome shade is solid rubber lined with a spun aluminium reflector, which kept the outer surface cool enough to hold while the bulb was lit.

The switch was the argument. Magistretti wanted a plain toggle; Ferrario insisted on a pneumatic squeeze bulb halfway down the cable, adapted from a darkroom shutter release, which clicks a diaphragm switch inside the base. Ferrario won. Domus called the lamp 'serious fun for serious desks', and it was photographed on drawing boards on the 26th floor of the Pirelli Tower for the company's own house magazine.

Early production was offered in black, signal orange and a deep tyre-wall grey. Artemide's showroom staff reportedly demonstrated it by dropping it from shoulder height onto the marble floor on Corso Monforte, and a small scuff on the rim of every surviving showroom sample is said to date from these demonstrations.