Hasta La Ideas

SHY Light by Bec Brittain This spare, modular chandelier’s thin LED tubes define its 1970s throwback vibe.

Here at Core77, we’ve been anxiously anticipating the rise of new lighting forms that embrace and highlight the strengths of CFL and LED bulbs. It’s great to see that we’re not the only ones…Dwell magazine welcomes Spring with their first annual Light and Energy issue. Inside the pages of this month’s issue, we not only see innovative examples of energy-efficient LED lamps and pendants, but we also get a brief history of the lightbulb from Edison to the shuttering of GE’s last American incandescent bulb favtory. Considering that “nineteen percent of the world’s energy use goes towards keeping it bright,” it’s a relief that designers are stepping up to the plate and taking on this challenge in style. Here’s an exclusive preview of this month’s lighting picks with Dwell senior editor, Kelsey Keith:

The primary focus of our April Light & Energy issue is how energy usage has rapidly changed in the past ten years, and will continue do so as incandescents are completely phased out by 2015.

For our product coverage this month, we took a different tack: I wanted to highlight the design of the newest, most groundbreaking lighting on the market. (Half of which, not-so-incidentally, are using LEDs in place of traditional bulbs, in a few cases even mimicking the old fluorescents.)

I think interior design, from lighting to furniture, is having a real ’70s moment—modified, of course, to fit today’s tech needs and finished with contemporary materials—so you’re seeing lots of brass and heavy metals. The forms range from attenuated strips to muscular, sculptural volumes, and in the case of Goodbye Edison’s desk lamp, Naama Hofman’s 005 Collection or Daphna Lauren’s standing lamp, the usage of these pieces as regular old lamps is rather ambiguous. Personally, I’m a fan of skinny silhouettes, as seen in Rich Brilliant Willing’s Channel series or architect Shigeru Ban’s floor lamp for FontanaArte. David Chipperfield’s brass table lamp is another favorite: thin, compact, and possessed with a very tactile materiality.

Les Fines Lamps by Goodbye Edison
An aluminum diffuser teetering on an attenuated steel base holds superslim LED lightbulbs and defies traditional desk lamp logic.

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