BINY FLOOR

Jacques Biny is an important French luminary from the era of the glorious 1930’s. Unlike other designers, he is also a publisher (industrial serial manufacturer) and has collaborated with some of the best young designers of his time, such as Michel Buffet, Gustave Gauthier, Jean Boris Lacroix or Charles Ramos. Together, they embarked on the adventure of modern serial lighting.

A graduate of the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, Jacques Biny first settled in Valence, his hometown, to work as a decorator. Faced with a lack of lighting in his sites, he decided to design his first models, which he offered to his clients. In 1950, after this successful experience, he returned to Paris and five years later founded his own modern lighting manufacturing workshop, Luminalite.

From then on, the latter participated assiduously in the main national trade fairs, manufactured nearly 400 models over thirty years in its factory on Rue de la Folie Regnault. Luminalite was also prominently involved in associative circles, defending the new science of contemporary lighting.

Modern and pioneering, the “designer-editor” created a sophisticated range of “rational luminaires” for the home and used state-of-the-art materials such as micro-perforated sheet metal or Plexiglas. Under her pencil, forms progressed and radicalized. Function and sobriety of lines are essential: the object by design is summarized with elementary and pure forms.