Vaghe Stelle

In 1982 I was commissioned to design a restaurant in Barcelona. The Brasserie FLO.

The owner, Jean Paul Bucher, also owned many of the best-known brasseries in Paris. We got on well from the start. He liked the project and I cannot say he held back any of my proposals.

Except. Except when I talked to him about the lighting.

My design called for white glass globes.

Bucher said to me: Monsieur Moragas: pas de boules. So what then?

He gave me the solution: Invent a lamp.

That is how the “Vaghe stelle” was born; at first it was called “Vaghe stelle dell’Olbrich”.

Taking Leopardi’s poem “Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa” and transmuting it with a reference to Joseph Olbrich and a little-known lamp of his, which was also related to Loos’s lamp in the Villa Scheu. In fact, they all go back to the medieval chandelier. A circle of candles. The “Robin Hood” chandelier I saw so many times at the Princesa cinema in Barcelona.

Antoni de Moragas