Luminaire’s founders and leaders, Nargis and Nasir Kassamali, have been awarded the prestigious Compasso d’Oro Award. The Compasso d’Oro is the first and highest honor in the industrial design circle. The award aims to acknowledge and promote quality in the field of industrial designs made in Italy and is awarded by ADI.
As stated by the awards committee, “Luminaire is not just a way of selling design; it is a narration of design…Luminaire has perpetually presented a continually evolving path, capable of innovating the distribution model by inserting culture and passion, transforming the traditional store concept into a place of experience and knowledge for a broad audience and not just for a small elite—a point of reference and enhancement for the culture of Made in Italy design on the international scene.”
Nasir and Nargis Kassamali, entrepreneurs and promoters of design culture, met at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. After graduating in 1970, they stayed in Copenhagen thanks to an exchange program, deepening their knowledge of European interior architecture and conceiving the idea of a tool to spread its quality, aesthetics and quality to the United States as well. attention to human relationships. In 1974 they opened the first Luminaire showroom in Miami, Florida, which was soon followed by three locations in Chicago and Los Angeles. All of them represent not only design diffusion centers, but also poles of public awareness and research on the project, where the best designers from all over the world have been invited since 1979.
Past winners of the award include visionaries such as Gio Ponti, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Mario Bellini, Richard Sapper, Achille Castiglioni, Paola Antonelli and Bruno Munari to name a few.
For more information on the Compasso d’Oro Award and its past winners, click here.
September 2020
