Hello Moto Following its appearance at darc room, David Morgan takes a closer look at formalighting’s extensive Motolux range of motorised architectural lighting products.
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development.
hen a lighting company started by two Italian brothers in London in the 1960s grows into
an international business with headquarters in Milan and Hong Kong, sales offices in
New York, London and Shanghai, it seems certain that the company will also have a highly adventurous approach to product
formalighting was founded in the UK by brothers Guido & Lorenzo Maghnagi as a distributor for a number of Italian lighting brands, including iGuzzini. The Maghnagi brothers chose to open their showroom in the Business Design Centre in Islington.
Working with leading Italian designers, the company then started to develop its own architectural lighting products. Lorenzo moved to
Hong Kong and established one of the first European-owned lighting factories in China to manufacture these ranges. The combination of Italian design flair with the lower manufacturing costs available in
China has allowed the company to expand steadily over 50 years and it now employs more than 180 staff worldwide.
When I first met Lorenzo in the 1970s, I would not have predicted
that formalighting would become the kind of company to create an impressive range of motorised architectural lighting products, but that is precisely what they have achieved.
The benefits of being able to aim and focus projector luminaires
without the need for cherry pickers, scaffolds or ladders have become more obvious due to increasing health and safety at work legislation. These requirements have dramatically increased the costs of
manual aiming in larger spaces. Conversely, the production costs of remote-controlled luminaires have fallen as the various enabling
digital technologies develop, which in turn has widened the market opportunity.
Looking specifically at formalighting’s Motolux range, it initially started as a collaboration with an American engineer who had
an existing patent for a fairly simple form of motorised lighting,
although the history of motorised and remote-controlled lighting
dates back to a much earlier period in the 1920s. Technical pioneers, including Herbert F King from Massachusetts, first filed a patent for a fiendishly complicated mechanism with separate control of pan and tilt, all driven by electric motors, which would allow products
on display in shop windows to be individually lit in sequence. A little later in 1929, Charles Andreino from Canada patented a similarly complex remote-controlled, motorised spotlight system that included focus control.
The first, and fairly limited, product introduction of the Motolux
range was at Light + Building in 2016, which resulted in a new patent David Morgan Associates, a Londonbased international design consultancy specialising in luminaire design and development and is also MD of Radiant Architectural Lighting. Email: david@dmadesign.co.uk Web: www.dmadesign.co.uk
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www.arc-magazine.com
for the motorised multi-axis gimbal rings. The initial range was well received and the formalighting development team spent the next two years leading up to this year’s Light + Building show creating
an impressive twelve different product families incorporating the
technology. These families include individual recessed downlights,