Among the world’s most vital creations is one, I think, we frequently take for granted. Can you imagine what it is? Did a lightbulb go off in your head? Great! Because a world without electric lighting would be a rather distinct and dark place.
For starters, it is likely you wouldn’t be reading this, since there’d be no computers. Add to this no TVs and, really, almost no electronics at all, since we wouldn’t have vacuum tubes, which resulted in transistors. Advances in communications and medicine would more than likely have been stifled. And what sort of work would we do? It’s an amazing fact, but the easy lightbulb kick-started progress and has formed every hour of our lives.
And to think it was just a little over a century ago. Ever since then megaimprovements have been made. But industrial designers are still experimentation. Lighting’s past accomplishments in addition to its future innovations are the focus of Lightopia, an exhibit at the Vitra Design Museum (September 28 through March 16, 2014) in Weil Am Rhein, Germany. It will follow the present exhibit on ancient structure, which I wrote about here. Following its run at Vitra, the exhibit will travel to other museums across the world (still to be announced).
Roughly 300 works will be shown within that which we’ll assume will be quite a well-lit Frank Gehry building on the museum’s campus. There will be films in addition to interactive and walk-through installations. Lightopia may also address issues such as light pollution, energy efficiency and topical issues such as bans on incandescent bulbs.
Some of the most effective past layouts will be exhibited, in addition to lighting from the museum’s own private collection which hasn’t been displayed publicly. These include pieces by a few famed designers, including Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Gino Sarfatti and Rody Graumans. When Graumans made 85 Lamps (pictured) in 1993 to get Droog, it made quite the splash. This is a chandelier which was stripped down to essential elements — black electric cords, sockets and lightbulbs — artfully. Graumans’ less-is-more strategy was a design landmark.
Lightopia also goes beyond real objects and reveals how mild defines space and creates moods, depending on what story is being told. One frightening example is that the mild choreography of Albert Speer. The Nazi architect exploited mild to convey power and instill fear in his Cathedral of Lights (revealed) in the Reich’s rally in Nuremberg. Lights were beamed five miles up to create the leaders seem more imposing than they were.
A lot of Lightopia is devoted to the long run and innovations, prototypes and present experimentation.
5 Wild Ideas From the Display
1. Dynamic structure. This reminds me of the Hasbro game Lite-Brite however on a much larger scale and with cooler technology. This is a rendering of a project named NIX by the company realities:united, which will be making structures dynamic. The facades communicate with the surroundings or, at leastdecorate them with digitalized lighting. A secondary digital system senses the absence of humans and controls the lights so. This was intended to get a building in Frankfurt, Germany, but the project never was. It could one day look in a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
2. Build-your-own light fixture and disposition. Olafur Eliasson’s Starbrick has separate modules of “starbricks,” which can be stacked or locked together to make different lighting situations. Here it is revealed as a floor lamp. In addition, it functions as a table or pendant luminaire. Using its own dimming feature, light can be customized to become more direct and operational or more mood ambient and setting. The semitransparent yellow mirror surfaces at the core are backlit by LEDs.
3. It’s alive! Science meets design in the Half-Life Lamp by Joris Laarman. Believe it or not, this bioluminescent lamp is powered by hamster cells injected with firefly DNA. No electricity is needed, it’s biodegradable, and no hamsters were damaged. In case your light were a living thing such as a plant, do you take much better care of it?
4. The art of light, or the light of art. Colour Light, by Daniel Rybakken and Andreas Engesvik, combines light and art. Lart? The multipiece freestanding light comes with an opaque disk illuminated from behind with a fluorescent tube. Different-colored displays were then leaned from the group to get a multilayered effect. This light was done for Ligne Roset.
5. The ever-evolving mild. No two days are alike with all the Surface Tension Lamp, designed by Front for Booo. As you can see from this picture, it is merely an LED light dangling from a metal pole. Right? Not quite.
It creates its own lampshade by blowing off a soap bubble round the LED light.
In the brief moment of its presence, the bubble captures the light and reflects that the room, a multicolored temporary structure.
Then it shines, and also a new bubble forms. Hypnotic.
Urrutia Design
The next time I turn a change, I know I will be more thankful. But I feel changes. Electric light, my reputable, immovable (sometimes colorful) buddy, appears intent on turning into a wee bit smarter. It wants to follow me (sensors), communicate with me (dynamic architecture) and react to my moods (shifting light colors). It may even expect me to nourish it, like a plant. Do you think light should improve?
Exhibit: September 28 through March 16, 2014, Vitra Design Museum, Weil Am Rhein, Germany. More information