Underground Sensation

Before making headlines over Switzerland's ban on new minarets for mosques, sleepy Langenthal was best known for its textile mills and porcelain factories.

Annie Block -- Interior Design, 1/1/2011 2:17:00 PM

Before making headlines over Switzerland's ban on new minarets for mosques, sleepy Langenthal was best known for its textile mills and porcelain factories. The town celebrates its creative and industrial heritage for one weekend, every other year, by hosting Designers' Saturday. It takes place at multiple venues, assigned by a committee, and one site for the 2010 installment was the headquarters of Création Baumann, which lent two basement storage areas to Foscarini for the occasion.

To stage an installation there, the Italian lighting maker called on Vicente García Jiménez. His namesake studio has designed three sconces and pendant fixtures for the company, but he was asked to use another Foscarini fixture for this project: Tress, a column lamp designed by Marc Sadler in 2008. Though the lamps are of course intended to stand on the floor, García Jiménez hung 105 of them from steel wire, end to end, to produce nine horizontal sculptures snaking through the cavernous spaces. "They gave life and warmth to a place that was mysterious and dark," he says. The lamps' diffusers, constructed from red ribbons of textured resin-fiberglass, also provided a tie-in to textile manufacturing.