A structural nakedness
In such a context, the effort to identify points of balance to be placed in the everyday landscape takes on an almost therapeutic role, providing a cognitive anchoring function that “holds the line” in the midst of the flows of incorporeal appearances that fluctuate nervously where things once stayed firm. Hence the value for today’s world of a project like Guglielmo Poletti’s To-Tie lamp for Flos, as simple and necessary as the point of equilibrium defined by the laws of physics, whose formal cleanliness, Poletti specifies, “is not simple nudity but structural nudity”, in the sense that the composition derives not from an expressive arbitrariness but from a long process of distillation, begun years earlier with the Equilibrium coffee table, though, continues Poletti, this has only a partial resemblance to To-Tie. “If it is true that there are different ways of putting together a cable and a cylinder, [in the case of the lamp] the light has removed that arbitrariness that was still in the table, since the cable, as well as being structure, has the function of conveying electricity, and the bar, apart from being a joint, is also a handle. There is not a single element out of place, a single component that could have been devised differently.” In this lies the maturity of this latest project compared to his previous youthful work, in this sort of overdetermination of the elements that reinforces, and therefore stabilizes, the structural necessity of the object.
