Right Now, a Lamp on Via Tortona Is Giving a Third-Floor Office a Fever
Lucia Ferretti-Wong's 37.8 has been on a surveyor's desk since September. Nobody in the room is ill. All four of them have been asked if they are.
The lamp sits on the corner of a desk on the third floor. It is ten past four. Nobody in the room has a cold.
Everyone looks as if they might.
The lamp is the 37.8, by Lucia Ferretti-Wong. Poured aluminium base. A pale glass shade, blown in a workshop in Bovisa, the colour of a cheek in a warm bed. It costs €640.
The office measures land for people who own it. Four desks. One plant. Gaetano Verlicchi bought the lamp in the last week of September because it was the only one he liked.
"I felt warm when I saw it," he says. "I assumed that was good."
The window has been open since Monday. The radiators are off. A colleague wears a scarf at her desk and says she is not cold. She says she is fine. She has said it several times.
On Tuesday a courier came in with a parcel. He looked at the room. He asked if someone should sit down. Verlicchi said it was the lamp. The courier said that was all right, he would stand.
Ferretti-Wong works from a studio near the Bovisa glassworks. She keeps no photographs of her lamps in rooms. She was asked what the 37.8 is for.
"A room should be able to say how it is feeling," she said.
She was asked if she had seen it in the surveyors' office. She had not. She was told it was on the third floor, facing the door.
"Then it is working," she said.
Verlicchi has ordered a second one for the meeting room. It arrives in November.
