FRITZ FEIJÓO ARQUITECTOS
Clavellina
“This lamp is more than a decorative object; it honors the roots of our land and the legacy of those who work with love and mastery. It is a tribute to the artisans of Manabí and to the cultures that have shaped the identity of this region.”
Arq. Fritz Feijóo Vera.
Conceived by Fritz Feijóo + Arquitectos, under the creative direction of Fritz Feijóo Vera, the lamp proposes an encounter between contemporary hospitality and the material memory of Manabí, articulating living techniques through a contemporary reading of their languages. Its name — Clavellina, in homage to the song “Romance de una tejedora” — establishes from the outset an intention: to recognize weaving not only as materiality, but as narrative and continuity.
The project is grounded in a strategic collaboration with the Museo del Sombrero de Paja Toquilla de Montecristi, founded and directed by Lorena Bravo. From the museum, research becomes method: approaching the territory, listening and documenting processes, recognizing authorship, and responsibly translating knowledge. This alliance does not simply “connect” design with communities; it defines an ethical framework for the work: generating value without extracting it, building visibility without appropriation, and restoring craft to a central place within contemporary design. In Clavellina, tradition does not operate as an aesthetic resource, but as a form of knowledge with its own rules: timing, tensions, finishes, precision.
Toquilla straw thus appears as a cultural technology. Its weave structures the volume and filters light through rhythm, density, and edge. The woven surface is not a skin: it is a sensitive structure. Each formal decision is calibrated to sustain a specific lighting effect, a shadow that reveals human labor, while also responding to high-end interior design requirements: consistency, finishing, durability, maintenance, and quality control. The lamp does not seek immediate spectacle; rather, it proposes a restrained presence, capable of shaping atmosphere and permanence. In this sense, luxury is understood not as excess, but as care: time invested as value, the hand as guarantee, technique as language.
The gesture is completed by earth. Clay, worked by artisans, introduces another temporality: a materiality that brings the territory to the center of the object, acting as both structural and symbolic hinge between components. Rather than concealing origin, Clavellina makes it legible. The piece is constructed in layers, fiber, earth, system, as an assemblage in which each material preserves its truth and memory, without dissolving into a merely decorative narrative. The lamp reads as a miniature architecture: a device that supports, orders, and qualifies space through light.
Clavellina is also a work about transmission. The participation of Camila Bailón, part of the new generation of weavers from Manabí, situates the project in the present: craft as continuity, memory as contemporary practice. Her presence, and her making, shifts the object from the strictly contemplative realm into the field of the living: technique as everyday performance, the hand as archive, time as a form of knowledge that is inherited. In an international context where “craft” is often consumed as image, the live demonstration restores its real condition: specialized work, discipline, and material thinking.
Within the framework of Milano Design Week, where design operates as a global language, Clavellina proposes a clear position: the future of material culture does not lie in turning tradition into motif, but in recognizing it as method. The lamp functions as a case of hospitality with identity, an object that does not merely “represent” a territory, but allows it to operate, and as an invitation to reimagine luxury from another scale: that of care, precision, and living memory. Here, to illuminate is not simply to light a space; it is to open a place where knowledge can remain visible, dignified, and contemporary.
studio link: www.fritzfeijoo-arquitectos.com