Treforchette Table Lamp (1997) Designer: Michelle de Lucchi

Design Classic – Influential and important design

Sofa

• Designer: Michelle de Lucchi
• Material: PVC shade and table forks
• Manufacturer: Produzione Privata, Italy

Produzione Privata was an experimental range that produced objects from the combination and assembly of simple, pre-existing components. This was created as a limited-edition collection of artifacts from Michele de Lucchi’s studio, Italy’s most well-known designer.

With his work with Studio Alchimia and, more famously, the Memphis group under Ettore Sottsass in the 1980s, de Lucchi established himself as a significant international designer. During this time, he worked as an industrial designer for several high-profile Italian companies, including Kartell, Artemide, and Olivetti, balancing his work on experimental but essentially one-off items.

With the Treforchette Table Lamp, Produzione Privata returned to more intimate and small-scale explorations, reflecting de Lucchi’s fascination with the concept of the found object in the twentieth century. Marcel Duchamp, who showed wine racks and urinals as artworks in the 1920s, pioneered this notion. Michele de Lucchi was looking for a new approach in his Treforchette design, which unexpectedly assembles commonplace objects. He built the shade out of a simple circle of PVC held by two “ready-made” metal cutlery forks. He aimed to rediscover the possibilities of the ordinary and every day in this way.

Sources and Additional Reading

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The design encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing. https://amzn.to/44PsTF6

McDermott, C. (1997). Twentieth-century design. Carlton. https://amzn.to/3WOMVxG

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