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Glo-Ball

Flos—Designers and manufacturers bemoan the profusion of cheaply made copycats, but it’s been proven time and again that truly great design can never be obscured by poor imitation. For evidence, look no further than the Italian lighting company Flos, which debuted Achille Castiglioni’s Arco in 1962 and watched it become the most-copied and best-selling lamp in the company’s history. Thirty-six years and many iconic products later, Flos produced another sensation—Jasper Morrison’s glass-and-steel Glo-Ball—which overtook the Arco as the best-selling series of lamps in the Flos catalog. Dwell recently visited the Glo-Ball manufacturing facility, which was, it must be said, inimitable.
flos glo ball hot glass

Molten Dust

Piombino Dese, a drab industrial town between Venice and Verona, has many small glass companies, including Vetrerie New Glass, founded by Franco Pellizzon in 1991 and one of several Glo-Ball suppliers. Pellizzon trained as a glassblower but saw no future for himself in the craft; he wanted to industrialize the process.

At Vetrerie New Glass, two warehouses surround a gravel yard, where the globes are lined up on cartons like eggs, shining despite the clouds. The glass technicians dip five-foot-long stainless steel poles into a transparent molten-sand mixture. A spherical shape is created by pressing a handheld cast-iron mold against the 800-degree-Celsius glass, which
rotates against the mold as the pole spins. The mold can only withstand a few seconds of heat before it needs to be dunked in water. After each pass against the mold, the glass is dipped into a white mix, adding another layer to the outside. The resulting hollow blob—–its skin like a sandwich of clear bread with white filling—–represents the completion of the first stage.

flos glo ball blow mold start

Blow Mold

When the blob has reached a diameter of about six inches, it has already been handled by two or three blowers, who multitask like chefs. The men work in shorts and sandals, protected from the heat only by a makeshift cloth cover on one arm. After these ages-old steps, the Glo-Ball’s most technological moment arrives, but the importance of craft is never eclipsed. “We have 12 glassblowers here,” says Pellizzon, “but only two of them can do this part. It’s difficult—–you have to know exactly how much to exhale and when to stop.”
Beneath the warehouse floor is a pit in which cold mist sprays directly onto a perforated-steel mold that opens and closes mechanically; when open, the concave inner surface can be seen, covered in charcoal powder. “Otherwise,” Pellizzon explains, “the glass comes out like orange peel.” The glass is lowered into the mold as it swings shut. The craftsman blows and spins the pole, passing it to a
coworker when he tires. Meanwhile, the water cools the conductive metal; after 40 seconds the mold opens and they lift out the formed globe.

flos glo ball cooling

Cool and Cut

Vetrerie New Glass can make 18 Glo-Balls per hour—Pellizzon keeps the operation tight in order to guarantee exceptional quality. The balls sit in a slow-cooling kiln for two hours; otherwise, they crack. With a fine abrasive cutting wheel, a young man slices off the parts that cling to the pole during the blowing process. A series of sanders and buffers make the aperture perfectly round and smooth: A flattener removes coarseness outside the cut, and a pointed sander that resembles a witch’s hat rubs out the circular opening.
Quality control is overseen by several women—the only female employees in the factory. They place the globes over a fluorescent bulb mounted on a rotating plywood sheet and check for nicks and discolorations. Vetrerie New Glass then transfers the globes to a local etcher, who dunks them into a corrosive hydrofluoric-acid solution that removes the shine and makes the outer surface matte—crucial for diffusion and durability.

flos glo ball insert

Put Together

West of Piombino Dese, in Bovezzo, the well-tended Glo-Balls meet the other parts of the lamp: laminated tubular steel stands, bases, and electronic components sourced in Milan.
At first glance the base seems unremarkable. Its intention—to disappear below the globe—is well met. And yet, its seemingly simple character owes its existence to modern technology.

“A cylinder gets run through a computer-numerically-controlled cutting machine to become a truncated cone,” says Giambattista Scalfi, Flos’s director of research and development. The result is a subtly proportioned piece that connects the flat circular base to a narrow tubular pole so the lamp can stand. A coat of gray paint makes it all look a bit like aluminum: a material illusion of weightlessness beneath the globe, which is in fact quite heavy. Unlike the staff decked out in T-shirts and shorts in Piombino Dese, here the factory workers wear matching orange shirts perhaps more suited to the mechanical and tidy processes they execute.

  • Published: January 1, 2009

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