There are objects that not only illuminate but also tell stories, doing so through precious details that reinvent themselves in every context. This is what happened with Pipistrello, the lamp designed by Gae Aulenti in 1965, which became one of the absolute icons of Italian design. Today, it returns in a special version that intertwines architecture, art, and memory. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Musée d’Orsay, Martinelli Luceand the renowned Parisian museum present a new chromatic finish, born from a silent but powerful dialogue between the lamp and the spaces that Aulenti herself helped transform in the 1980s.
The Musée d’Orsay is one of the most extraordinary examples of 20th-century architectural conversion, a symbol and an icon: a railway station that becomes a temple of art, a place suspended between industrial past and museum splendor. When Gae Aulenti was called to design the interiors, she read the original structure as a living organism, allowing light to guide visitors through its masterpieces.
It is in this dialogue between space and perception that the deep connection with Pipistrello is born, designed twenty years earlier for the Olivetti showroom in Paris and produced by Martinelli Luce. A lamp that at the time already defied the rules, experimenting with innovative materials such as methacrylate and a telescopic mechanism that still defines its unmistakable silhouette today. The new finish is not just a color; it is a fragment of the Musée d’Orsay’s atmosphere and a material echo of an architectural detail that belongs to its most intimate identity. In this new version, it is as if Pipistrello absorbs a hue from the space that Aulenti helped reinvent, now returning it in the form of domestic light. A light that, in this special edition, becomes a tribute to the museum’s history and Aulenti’s design power, capable of imagining both the monumental spaces of a great cultural institution and an object destined to enter people’s daily lives.
To underscore this new edition, the logos of the Musée d’Orsay and Martinelli Luce are engraved on the cone: a subtle yet deeply meaningful gesture that makes the lamp a bridge between two worlds. Produced in three sizes, this special edition Pipistrello thus becomes a tribute to the museum’s history and to Aulenti’s design prowess, capable of envisioning both the monumental spaces of a major cultural institution and an object destined to become part of people’s everyday lives.
In this new form, Pipistrello becomes a story that traverses time, a meeting of architecture and design that continues to resonate, decades later, with the same visionary energy with which it was conceived. A celebration that illuminates not only spaces but also the memory of what design can be: a bridge between places, eras, and sensibilities.
Photo © Francis Amiand
