BURNING BRIGHT

This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has its share of charming hand-blocked wallpapers, embroidered throw pillows, and driftwood end tables, but what shines most brightly are the LED light fixtures. LED technology is advancing so rapidly that each year brings lights that are more energy-efficient, longer lasting, less costly, and with improved light quality. LED’s are so much more smarter and smaller (about an eighth of an inch in diameter) than incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, that they might do for lighting what steel did for construction – bring about an entirely new model for design.

And just as the first wave of steel-frame buildings were clad in stone panels to give the sound appearance of a building, most LED light fixtures are designed with shades and baffles that, primarily, give the sound appearance of a lamp. Vendors at ICFF are cloaking LED diodes in nostalgic fittings, with shades made in warm materials (dark woods, textured metals, cardboards, felt), as if trying to soften the technology before permitting it into our living rooms. One Swedish company even sells an LED pendant that looks like a bare incandescent bulb.

Only a few designers seem interested in exploiting the tiny size of the bulbs. Unsentimental designers tend to line the diodes up in lines, like a tape, or add a long, cylindrical lens to them, turning the brilliant pinpoints into light sabers. But there are hints of what lies ahead. One English fabricator is showing wallpapers that have LED diodes integrated within their baroque patterns, and one artist is showing lamps made of clouds of them, that resemble models of the atom more than chandeliers. They get at the potentially revolutionary question: what does an LED light fixture look like?

Image of “Bubble Chandelier” courtesy of Pelle Designs.

May 28, 2014 by Nalina Moses

There are museums and then there is the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Even the names of its rooms make magic, like The Twenty-Column Hall, The Raphael Loggias, and The Blackamoor Dining-Room. The galleries are so opulent that the collections of artwork they house, which are superb, might be beside the point. This museum is an immense, multi-courtyarded complex that overlooks Plaza Square on one side and the Neva River on the other. On the outside, it’s formidable, with an endless facade that’s been restored to a delicate tint of blue-green that evokes both sea and sky.

On the inside, particularly in those rooms that were originally part of the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, it’s decorated with fairytale splendor. To visit the Hermitage is to move from one astoundingly furnished gallery to the next. They are dressed with gilded and coffered and vaulted ceilings, tapestries and bas-reliefs, wood parquetry and tile mosaics, and chandeliers exploding with crystals. There doesn’t seem to be any architecture present – every surface dissolves into ornament. And the ornament is executed with such fineness that it’s never over-sweet; it all seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. (The ornament seems, also, more Asian in spirit than European.) The highlight might be St. George Hall, the room where the Romanovs held their coronations. It’s finished in a frosted palette of blue and white, with gold accents that shimmer in the white daylight. The museum’s astonishing interior design that offers a seamless dream of royal Russia.

July 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses