When is too much too much? When does precision laser edge its way out of accuracy and into excessiveness? And is this trajectory considered negative? Could it be? Herve Van der Straeten’s 15-light Excess chandelier for Saint-Louis is on the upward slope of these unmitigated emotions because it’s not excess; it’s exquisite. Read the rest of this entry »
Were the Earth clad in metal, I may not mind. It is a predilection for opposites, I suppose, my tendency toward wild woods or treeless plains of industrial landscape. Perhaps it is a discomfort with the tense coexistence between the wild and the domestic in suburban life. Either way, psychoanalysis seems the worst discipline sometimes, and it’s worth it to leave joy unexamined. Were Eleek Inc. tasked with designing this metal-clad world, I’m certain of my happiness.
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Even a century-old lighting company (140 years, to be exact) knows it’s hip to be square. Schonbek, which specializes in glittering, scintillating, splendorous Ur-chandeliers—the type of chandeliers one thinks of when one considers the very word chandelier (the type of chandelier that graces illustrious institutions like the White House and Buckingham Palace)—is introducing Riviera for 2013.
A gleaming box of stainless steel or brushed stainless steel containing a myriad of clear dangling crystals (Swarovski Elements or Spectra), Riviera proves that square can still be glamorous—as glamorous as the Hollywood vamps of yesteryear with their ruby red lips and luscious falls of hair.
Available in eight sizes, including rectangular and two-tiered versions, Riviera may be a chandelier to save marriages. Offering a true compromise between traditional chandeliers and modern luminaires, Riviera features clean geometry and resplendent crystals. And while they shine in glorious prismatic beauty, the crystals are rectangular, resembling chiseled little icicles or beveled gems.
We love Houdini because he did the things we could not. Buried alive, he clawed his way out. Enlaced in police-locked chains, he broke free. Upside down and submerged in a man-size tank of water (man with an axe nearby, just in case), he resurfaced. Buoyed and ecstatic by Houdini’s perfect track record of combating personal fears (Death! Disaster! Failure! Ever-impending Doom!), audiences delighted in this adrenal form of live entertainment.
This week we’re dedicating our writing to unusual chandeliers that blow our minds, and if you stare at Houdini from Corbett Lighting’s Fascination Collection for long enough (give it a minute…), you’ll see what I mean. At first, I thought the magic of Houdini was the interlocking of the boxes. I was caught up in the magic of the linking, the unlinking, the slipping in of the teeny-tiny box-sized chandeliers, but then I began to feel the uneasiness of another kind of magicking: the balance. How do boxes such as these not slip and slide around weighted by gravity’s diagonals and sounding like the sibilance of my mother in the kitchen sharpening her knives?
The fascination and magic of Corbett Lighting’s Houdini is that it does in fact defy gravity. Read the rest of this entry »
There are certain elements of design that are used to upset, alienate, or anger. Poor design just makes you feel confused and tired. But sometimes there are features of design that are the ocular equivalent of what it feels like to take the first sip of a cold pale ale in August or to hover a glass mug of coffee under your chin in January to feel the steam. Earnest design seems to sedate you in the best way, like it were the sand shifting to conform to your seat while you watched the ocean. Read the rest of this entry »
This basil-green dew-drop Borghese chandelier from New York’s Canopy Designs seems to serve as less of interior lighting and more of a four-poster canopy bed strung and hung from spring-blossomed branches for Titania, the Queen of the Fairies from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Read the rest of this entry »
This week Chandeliering is covering lighting fixtures that fool the eye, what I might term illumination illusionists. One of these enchanting wonders hails from Berlin, the brainchild of Pink+Gruen, a lighting art duo otherwise known as Elias Keimer and Crishan Böhner. Their PIXL HELIX light installation results from a general dissatisfaction they explain as “unfulfilled high expectations of lighting technique.” Pink+Gruen’s animus generated the PIXL SYS, a “core element” that is “supermodular, small, lightweight, bright, and DMX-controllable.” The basic unit also looks great, with a sleek and cylindrical black aluminum body. PIXL SYS, in fact, works as an autonomous design object. Read the rest of this entry »
Representational yet very much of the twenty-first century in their wit and subtlety, Lorenza Bozzoli’s Juuyo lamps provide a welcome contrast to the visible bulbs and linearity of the rest of the Moooi Unexpected Welcome collection exhibited at the 2013 Salone del Mobile, recently concluded in Milan. Read the rest of this entry »
Keeping a cloud in a certain state of permanence, whether it is a beloved shape or a masterpiece of the imagination, is a sense of success that always seems impossible to achieve. Looking skyward, cloud gazing, is ultimately a lesson in letting go, in surrender. There were days when I would angrily admit it’s not there anymore, and feel frustrated that my friends couldn’t see what I saw, and I couldn’t always see it the way they did. But, Maurizio Galante, the world’s most respected haute couture fashion designer, has captured a cloud, in glass, and enhanced it with a technique primarily reserved for fabric. Using the same techniques that first launched Galante to high-fashion couture stardom, he has replicated the classic plissé (French for to fold or to pleat) effect, sustained it in glass, and illuminated it from within to create a lit, fashion-inspired statement entitled Plissé Cloud. Read the rest of this entry »
Italian lighting company Fabbian showed four new products at Euroluce 2013. The collection, comprised of Stick, Cloudy, Ray, and Clove, played with different materials and their possibilities—from wood to glass, polycarbonate to metal. While it was difficult to confine ourselves to writing about only one of these new lights, we chose Cloudy, an ethereal suspension lamp that, despite the name, represents “a positive sign of hope and optimism.” Read the rest of this entry »
