Gae Aulenti

Gae Aulenti trained as an architect in Milan at a time when very few women did, and she moved between buildings, exhibitions and single objects without treating any of them as smaller work. She turned a disused railway station into the Musée d'Orsay and, along the way, drew one of the most recognised lamps of the century.

The Pipistrello from 1965 takes its name from the bat: a stem that rises from a lacquered base and opens into curved wings of opal methacrylate. It reads as sculpture when it is off and as a soft pool of light when it is on. Martinelli Luce has kept it in production without redrawing it.