Panter & Tourron & BWB Surface Technology

Stefano Panterotto and Alexis Tourron met at ECAL in Lausanne, where both studied Design for Luxury and Craftsmanship, and founded Panter & Tourron in 2017. The studio works across product and spatial design, creative direction, and consulting, driven by material investigation and a conviction that technical innovation carries more weight than formal novelty.

Hall is made from an extruded aluminium tube, cut along the axis, one half inverted, both halves fastened to a rigid strip-LED. A dimmable light that adapts to the room. The construction is the form: structure, optics, and heat dissipation share one profile. The gradient color treatments are developed in collaboration with BWB Surface Technology in Altenrhein, Switzerland, specialists in surface refinements who brought architectural-grade anodization know-how into the scale and intimacy of an interior object.

Under the creative direction of Sebastian Vargas, Hall is the first Profiler Special Project: a program that brings designers and the industry into a shared production, framing the lamp as both a lighting object and a documented story of process. Days before presenting Hall at two exhibitions during Milan Design Week, Pro Helvetia’s Shared Matter at Spaziovento and Capsule Plaza, we had a talk about it.

We would not define ourselves as minimalists. When we started our practice together we worked a lot with the world of luxury, where design is only one part of the experience, not the end. We made it work for us shifting the paradigm from scarcity or exclusivity to performance first, envisioning products for the highest standards. It always ended being about material and how you use it more than just form. How much of something you use, why, where and how. If you use something, it just has to make sense, not always strictly technically, sometimes it could be just about volume and perception, otherwise it becomes obscene. That’s sustainability in the end. It shaped our design vision on everything. It’s about making things that are pure, not poor.

Aluminium has always been an attention-catcher for us. People often say that metals are “cold,” especially compared to wood or other materials, but we actually find aluminium quite warm, not only in terms of tactility, but also in perception. You can treat it in so many different ways: make it smooth or rough, and, as we’ve explored, you can even color it, almost like a canvas.

It’s both a soft and a hard material at the same time, which makes it very interesting to work with. It’s also honest. It can be recycled infinitely without losing any of its original quality, and recycling it requires only about 5% of the energy needed to produce primary aluminium.

We were looking at floor lamps from the 60s-70s-80s, and we loved the simplicity of some of Magistretti and Castiglioni’s pieces. Effortless elegance, a gesture. Almost Duchampian, almost a poetic assembly of parts as a ready-made more than an actual design. Or sometimes a simple gesture, like a fold. I think over the last decades the perception of beauty and fascination behind a purely functional industrial part was the reflection of the established ethos of form follows function. We started from the same roots. A hollow pipe in aluminium. Functional, yet smooth and perfect. Light yet extremely strong. Endlessly recyclable. A perfect object. We cut it and flipped it. Now it’s concave, it does something with light and shocks even when it’s off.

I think it really highlights the true reality of industrial production, which is often quite different from what people imagine. We tend to picture endless lines of robotic arms doing all the work, with no human interaction, but in reality, it’s almost always a combination of both. There’s still a strong human presence behind the machines.

It actually makes me think of the Luddites. There’s been a lot of renewed discussion about them recently with the rise of AI. They weren’t against machines themselves; they were skilled workers who worked with them. What they resisted was the misuse of technology, and I think that idea still resonates today. It’s about machining that enhances and supports human intuition.

And that’s also where large industries have a real advantage: they have the resources to invest in innovation and, just as importantly, to give technicians, designers, and researchers the time to explore. Because when you look at it, every advanced technology we rely on today started out as something very hands-on and experimental.

It’s always a gradual, incremental process: you test, you adjust, you improve step by step, until eventually it becomes something that can be scaled. And I think what’s often underestimated is how critical time is in that journey: time to think, to experiment, to fail, and then refine an idea or a technique until it’s ready to grow into something much bigger.

It started on screens, playing with interpolating colors from BWB color palettes to create harmonious and striking gradient color combinations. But then the process itself turned premeditation into improvisation. An idea into action.

We are a hyper visual culture. Most of the things we look at are highly post-processed, and this shifts the perception we have with real artefacts, altering expectations of how a real product should look. This is where the beauty lies here. The perfect gradients on the screen become alive through the splashes, the spots, the out-of-control results. It makes these perfect shapes organic again. Unique. For us, that’s freedom.

Of course. The lamp at the end is two things at once. A utilitarian artefact, conveying both beauty and function. But also the vessel for experimentation and storytelling. It becomes the canvas for playing with technology, and the process itself became the story told through words and images.