During Milan Design Week 2025, SOM took part in events across the city to kick off a product collaboration with Artemide, the legendary Italian manufacturer of high-design lighting. A prototype of Tetras, a new lighting fixture designed by SOM, was presented at the Euroluce exhibition of Salone del Mobile, at Artemide’s showroom, and in a special installation commissioned by Interni magazine at the University of Milan.

Tetras is a modular fixture that conceives of light as an architectural building block—a single element that can be deployed in series to create volumes of light. With a minimalist approach to form and materials, the fixture is designed as an instrument for efficiency, comfort, and delight.

On April 7, SOM Partner Chris Cooper joined Artemide President and CEO Carlotta de Bevilacqua to present Tetras at Artemide’s showroom. “We have a design philosophy that we call radical reduction—it’s about doing the most with the least,” Cooper said. “In designing the most flexible module of light, we reached out to the best partner we could imagine, Artemide, who brought their knowledge and expertise in lighting. This is very much the way that SOM works, advancing new ideas through collaboration and partnership.”

Thousands of visitors to Milan Design Week had the opportunity to experience SOM’s Tetras lighting in the exhibition organized by Interni. Staged in the historic 15th-century courtyard of the Ca’ Granda at the University of Milan, Interni’s exhibition is a centerpiece of the FuoriSalone program of collateral events around the city. Thirteen Tetras fixtures were hung perpendicularly within the loggia’s archways to create an iconographic display.