String Lights

Cyprus-born Michael Anastassiades is an engineer and industrial designer based in London. He takes his inspiration from the memories and images he has of his home country and from where he lives now, and creates objects of rare quality that may be simple in appearance but feature a poetic language and are produced by highly acclaimed factories or by his own company. String Lights, designed for Flos, is both ambitious and humble at the same time. It reduces the light to its essential elements: an electric wire and an illuminating body. Anastassiade's electric wires become black lines that stand out as they run through space, like parallel wires running from one pylon to another and marking out the land. if the designer has strings of light in mind (the - often garish - strings of lights that decorate the piazzas of Mediterranean villages during festivals), here everything is much more simplified. Cone and sphere-shaped bodies of light are set up pleasingly, without worrying about wsitches and points of light, the position of which is often chosen based on other secondary criteria that don't always correspond to our needs. As a project, String Lights really does design and free space.