Bul-bo

The iconic lamp Bul-bo, designed between 1968 and 1971 by Roberto Gabetti, Aimaro Isola, Guido Drocco and Luciano Refor the Olivetti Residential Centre in Ivrea, is now re-presented by Axolight. In 1968 - when one of the most disruptive mass movements of the 1900s was born in cities around the world and rural landscapes definitively gave way to the aesthetic impact of factories - the Gabetti and Isola studio started the construction project of the Olivetti Residential Centre in Ivrea, giving life to innovative residential solutions (designed for the employees of Olivetti, one of the most important companies in the world in the 1900s) whose legacy is the idea of a new way of living spaces. The interior of the building, which consists of 82 housing units with a set of functional, modular and playful furnishings, was designed to give the guests of the structure an ideal psycho-physical comfort. This is how the Bul-Bo lamp was born, an illuminating flag around which the various furnishing accessories gathered - no longer fixed to the walls, as per tradition, but free in space - designed and built by Gabetti and Isola specifically for residential buildings. The guests of the residence, in fact, with the exception of Bul-Bo, could choose their furnishings among the various proposals of the studio. Bul-Bo was and remains an object of a break with the past. This lamp was designed to help create a residential environment inspired by Schiller: playful, free and oriented to bring psychophysical well-being to its guests. This floor lamp takes its name from its base, a bulb indeed, made of faux leather (since its first edition) and filled inside with marble granules, which acts as a counterweight and – at the same time – as a support to an aluminium stem that ends with the metal shape of a bulb. A lamp with an extremely innovative design, which can change its position with variable inclinations, assuming new identities and maintaining the ironic and empathic appearance that distinguished all the furnishings of the Olivetti Residential Centre. Strongly non-conforming and revolutionary, the design experience of Gabetti and Isola for Olivetti has left an indelible trace on custom, therefore drawing the interest of a large audience of collectors, who still compete to buy Bul-Bo and the other works of the studio at design and modernisation auctions.