50 Shades: Linea Light Group

Light can elicit emotion or calm us, clarify or embellish, give us perspective or a delirious lack thereof. It can even determine in what light we view the rest of the world.

And yet few of us appreciate the fact that the impalpable stuff that illuminates our lives is actually designed with great care. With the launch of its revitalised website, Italy’s Linea Light Group (LLG) remedies this by shedding light on the great breadth and variety of spaces, indoors and out, that its products enlighten. More compelling than the technical details and product specs, the site’s Case Histories serve not just as tools for architects, electricians and lighting designers, but as switches that turn the imagination on.

LLG’s offerings have a richness that stems from the diversity of the three brands – Minulamp, Eva Stampaggi and Linea Light – who banded together in 1985, bringing all aspects of production in-house and keeping it in Italy, while augmenting each others’ strengths to form a catalogue that has proven comprehensive, cutting-edge, eco-aware, versatile and international in scope.

By 1989, LLG had begun to develop its products along several lines: the home collection, a line devoted to the contract market with emphasis on the fusion of the traditional and the progressive; the architectural collection, launched in 1994, with a focus on technical and architectural systems; the professional collection dedicated, since 2001, to pushing the envelope of LED technology (though LED solutions exist across collections) through research, experimentation and collaboration with architects and designers under the rubric of – and in a 1,400 square-metre laboratory called – the LightVillage; and, in 2010, the Material & Design collection, devoted to materials innovation and ideas.

The Group has been pioneering or extending LED performance-enhancing technologies like Dynamic White, Clear Shield, TVS, Full HD Cri95, F.O.L. and SmartWave, the DMX protocol and rotational moulding techniques, earning awards that include multiple Red Dots and, within the past six years, opening outposts from France, Russia and Poland to the US and the Middle and Far East.

The LLG site’s Case Histories highlight the brand’s range, demonstrating how uniquely its products respond to diverse sites, settings and needs: from the precision lighting of artworks, which must be both robust and discreet, to the ethereal and unobtrusive illumination of spiritual spaces; from palatial hospitality – the rose-hued splendour of the Doha Sheraton Hotel, for example, which offers seamless Old World sumptuousness while relying on New World tech to support it – to the finely detailed exhibition of, say, textiles whose every warp, weft and drape must be visible without any glare. From crisply lit retail interiors like a wine shop to ancient ruins, like the House of Augustus & Livia in Rome, that require nuance in order to conserve artifacts while giving them a soft clarity.

Web visitors will find stories about a nursery school that makes learning easy on the eyes; restaurant dining rooms that balance intimate with public; an open-air children’s park whose lighting addresses safety issues, heavy traffic and the intense visuals of an entertainment venue; and the patrician facade of an old bank building that conveys strength and stability through the passage of time and tempers the brightness that could make historical grandeur appear harsh and outdated.

The site catalogues not just products, but fresh, meticulously engineered, systemic solutions to challenges posed by projects as diverse as a theatre in Moscow, a boutique hotel in Greece and a residential tower in Milan, parliament buildings and expo pavilions, ancient sites in Spain, a gallery in Athens and automaker Porsche’s Padua headquarters. And in each project the brand treats light as if it were a fine textile, weaving and reweaving it, knitting and reknitting it, to fit the body of each space like a glove to one’s hand.

© Architonic