Nearly all over the place you go, from the physician’s workplace to the library to the automobile dealership, there’s one ubiquitous design gem hidden in plain sight: the Bic Cristal.
This unsung hero of the writing desk has produced uncountable signatures and annotations—however now it’s getting its second within the highlight by a collaboration with the Italian house items model Seletti.
The Bic Cristal is the world’s best-selling pen, boasting more than 120 billion sales since its launch in 1950. For the tail finish of the pen’s seventy fifth anniversary, Bic teamed up with Seletti to provide a murals impressed by the pen: a large, 12:1 scale lamp.
The product’s large scale interprets significantly nicely for a lamp, with a transparent case revealing a glowing, neon-like LED mild inside. It may be positioned vertically or horizontally, and used as a ground lamp, pendant, or wall sconce. The lamp shall be accessible within the pen’s traditional blue, crimson, and black colorways when it debuts within the U.S. later this yr for round $350.
Why the Bic Cristal makes an ideal lamp
The Bic Cristal is an adaptation of the first-ever ballpoint pen, invented in 1938 by a Hungarian journalist named László Biró (therefore the pen’s widespread nickname, the Bic Biro). In keeping with a breakdown written for the MoMA exhibition Pirouette: Turning Factors in Design, which featured the Bic Crystal, Biró’s unique pen was designed to permit ink to stream extra constantly than older fountain pens, nevertheless it nonetheless had some points with clogging and leaking.
After buying Biró’s patent, Bic founder Marcel Bich adjusted the design to incorporate a smaller, 1-millimeter-wide ballpoint tip with a easy quirk: an air gap, which prevented a vacuum from forming contained in the pen. This tiny tweak permits the pen’s ink to stream freely to the nub, and is what makes it such a dependable option to this present day.
Aesthetically, Bich’s alternative of a transparent plastic for the pen’s physique reveals the way it works and renders it immediately recognizable. Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of structure and design, mentioned within the museum’s breakdown, “It nearly appears to be like like it’s inside a crystal tube. It was such an exquisite use of plastic that nearly made us suppose plastic might be treasured.”
Artwork director Stefano Seletti was equally drawn to the Bic Cristal’s modern, crystalline aesthetic as a possible lighting object for Seletti. Because the model started dabbling in lighting a number of years in the past, it’s embraced an out-of-the-box method to its catalog, enjoying with every thing from animal figures holding light bulbs to an anatomically correct rendition of a human coronary heart.
“The construction of the pen was completely good for this challenge: The clear tubular physique permits mild to cross by, the ink cartridge may simply be reworked into the LED that gives the sunshine, and {the electrical} elements might be simply hidden by the coloured plastic components,” Seletti says. His workforce partnered with Italian designer Mario Paroli, in addition to with Bic, to deliver the Bic Lamp to life. They used Bic’s archives and technical drawings to faithfully reproduce the pen at a 12-to-1 scale.
The ultimate product is an ode to Bic’s simple-yet-functional design ethos—and it’s the right kitsch addition to any area the place writing will get finished.
