50 Lights [antikvár]

Introduction: Of Lamps and Shoes Contemporary designers have found in technology a precious resource for their poetry; therefore, this book, 50 Lights, could have been just as easily called 50 Sonnets. Today, technology offers designers access to new materials and techniques that they can change and customize at will, a facility that offers them a new exhilarating freedom. Good contemporary designers, like musicians Improvising jazz, have learned to take advantage of this new freedom with an elegant nonchalance acquired only through years of strenuous technical exercise. Mel Byars, an acute contemporary obsen/er, describes these virtuoso exercises with a detached approach that allows the beauty of the design process to shins through. At the same time, he makes It possible for a design object and its significance to be easily understood by a wide audience. Design has been a trade secret for years because too many of its commentators have preferred intellectual distance over communallty with the world of things. While good designers struggle to make beautiful things, design critics and historians have felt compelled to elevate these things to the status of well-designed objects. The real world comes back with a vengeance: about a century of Industrial-design history shows that only a few well-designed objects have graduated to become beautiful things. This shift In status occurs when design objects become universally understood, appreciated, and used every day by everyone. A gently subversive design critic such as Mel Byars has a way of initiating this process. He focuses his attention on a few selected good objects and then disseminates the simple Intellectual joy of revealing how they are made. After his books, 50 Chairs and 50 Tables, It is the lamp's turn. Dutch designer Gijs Bakker once provoklngly obsen/ed that bulb manufacturers have already done the difficult job, leaving designers simply to dream up ways to conceal the bulb. Therefore, designing a lamp might seem a redundant task. In women's shoe design, for example, one could similarly assert that footwear manufacturers have already performed the difficult job, leaving designers simply to dream up ways of keeping the sole attached to the foot. But, on the contrary, necessity of function coexists with the pure, sensual delight of form and variation, and together they elevate lamps to the status of design fetishes. Some lamps are as painfully gratifying and as Impractical as patent-leather, spike-heeled shoes, while some others are as soothing and embracing as a pair of Air Jordans. People buy lamps, just like shoes, to make a stylistic statement. A useful exercise might be to think of the psychological and sociological implications of a crystal chandelier, the 'TIzIo" desk lamp, or the small plastic abat-jour by Philippe Starck Lamps are a very personal, defining choice. In a designer's hands, light surely gives our world its definition. For this reason, light has for a very long time obsessed architects who have built the world in its religious adoration. Ever since electricity brought the sun and the moon Into our homes 24 hours a day, the obsession spread to Interior and Industrial designers. Nothing reaches deeper into a designer's soul than the challenge of creating a lighting fixture. A lamp brings a designer's voice to Its lyrical extremes-because It does not have to follow the body's physical limitations, because it allows for a subtle play with translucence and shadow, because it has a hot and luminous core, because it can be made of so many different materials. Chairs and tables, with their gross volumes, may disguise the true nature of a passionate neo-baroque or sensitive minimalist sprit, but lamps don't He. With these 50 design tales from the past decade, Mel Byars encompasses the horizon of design at almost the close of the 20th century, when advanced materials and high technology have required a scrupulous craftsman's approach and old-fashioned manufacturing processes have found new life In diversified series and unexpected combinations. At last, the adjective "industrial" Is an option,