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Feature
In Profile: Designers Who Make an Art Out of Light
Thomas Alva Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb in 1876, and the world became modern. In the years since, technology has continued to transform the light bulb—from incandescent to fluorescent, to today’s LEDs and OLEDs, and beyond. Lighting has long been a preoccupation for designers: the opportunity to take a functional object and turn it into a work with a higher calling.
In articles to follow, our first-ever special focus section, MODERN looks at both the history and future of lighting as design. You will read about designers who work with light and discover new ways to look at nature or aesthetics. We’ve selected seven designers whose work crosses over from the practical to the poetic, whose work is shown in leading design galleries and collected by museums. You will see ten early modern lighting designs that shaped the future, and read about the Italian companies that have fostered design and ensured that what we put in our living rooms and libraries has more than mere function. A final article looks at the forces—from ever-advancing technology to the repurposing of old materials— that are shaping the future. Can I resist a pun here? No. I hope you will find this section illuminating.
Michael Anastassiades
COURTESY MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES
Michael Anastassiades’s designs are often described as minimal and stark—their forms elemental and geometric, their materials and finishes sophisticated and discreet, their function utilitarian. Since establishing his studio in 1994, the Cyprus-born, London- based Anastassiades has been sought after for designs that project clarity of vision and scrupulous attention to detail, perhaps owing in part to his background in civil engineering, which he pursued before earning a master’s degree in industrial design. The past twenty-odd years have seen him produce furniture and housewares collections for major manufacturers from Lobmeyr and Svenskt Tenn to FLOS; collaborate with renowned architects David Chipperfield and John Pawson; and in 2007 launch his own eponymous line of lighting, furniture, tableware, and jewelry.
COURTESY MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES
And yet, despite this serious pedigree, there’s something unusual about Anastassiades’s designs, a quality that provokes a hard sidelong look, a feeling that you’ll miss something the moment you turn your back.
Take his lighting, for which he’s best known. Produced in attractive materials with an undeniable rigor—bases typically come in brass polished to a buttery nish, plated in mirrorlike nickel, or patinated to a velvet black, and shades are perfect mouth-blown orbs of milky glass—each piece somehow expresses a spirit at odds with its refined parts. The titles are the tip-off that this is no accident. In Tip of the Tongue, the glass sphere is suspended at the edge of a brass cylinder, on the verge of toppling off. In Get Set, it toes the edge of a brass bar lying flat on the ground, like a runner poised at the starting line. In Rest, it leans nonchalantly against the bar now tipped on its side, somehow conveying loosely bent elbows and a casually crossed ankle.
COURTESY MICHAEL ANASTASSIADES
Once you imagine these glowing globes as capable of activities far beyond lighting up—although, for those inclined to anthropomorphize, even that most basic function can be taken as a sign of life—try not to see Anastassiades’s other creations as full of character: the Mobile Chandeliers like skillful acrobats hanging from slender rods bowing gracefully to their weight; the Loop collection—created exclusively for The Future Perfect—like aerialists suspended mid-spectacle from powder-coated green hoops. Even the pendants of the Happy Together series— handsome and substantial—can begin to evoke a Busby Berkeley showstopper: glamorous, polished, and precise, not an appendage out of place, and every face lit up by a dazzling smile.
-Jenny Florence
