Sometime in the mid-1960s, an architect in Milan picked up the telephone and described a lamp. He sent no drawing. Ten days later the finished lamp arrived at his studio.

Vico Magistretti spent more than sixty years in a single studio on the corner of via Conservatorio. He trained as an architect, inherited his father’s practice, and built apartment towers, a church, a town hall, a university department and a maintenance depot for the Milan metro over two hundred and forty metres long. He is remembered almost entirely for a bedside lamp.

This is how he got there, through a wartime internment camp in Lausanne, an excommunication by CIAM over a set of window shutters, a chair designed for a golf club restaurant, and a conviction that if an idea is clear enough, you shouldn’t need to draw it at all.

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