In the Details: What Is Laokoon?
Posted in: In the Details
A close-up view of Laokoon’s new Enso lamp, made of the Hungarian company’s namesake material
In the Details is our weekly look at especially smart, innovative or unusual details of a new design.
When the designers of the Enso lamp start talking about how it evolved from Laokoon, the product’s chameleon-like material, the details become a little elusive. “What I wanted to express was actually the potential Laokoon represents,” says Lili Gulbert, the creative head and CEO of the Hungary-based company also called Laokoon. “I refused to close it into a definition and instead helped it find its own shape and explanation.”
If the explanation is a little squishy, perhaps it’s because the lamp is too. Enso undergoes morphological changes—twisting, arching, opening and wilting—when manipulated by the user. “You just have to experience it,” Gulbert says. “People are drawn to touching it. The material doesn’t have rules.”
It may not have rules, but it does have a structure. Indeed, Laokoon may be best understood not as a material per se, but as a system. Strips of other materials—such as plastic, wood, paper, or leather—are laced together using a proprietary system developed by the Hungarian textile and tapestry designer Zsuzsanna Szentirmai-Joly. “The shape is basically a matrix that can be applied in different—but, of course, not endless—material variations,” Szentirmai-Joly says.
Above and below: Some of Enso’s many possibly permutations
In the case of the Enso lamp, the designers used 80 two-inch-wide strips of transparent plastic. The strips are scalloped and layered with printed color before being laced together horizontally. When the pieces are linked, the strips slide over each other to strike a pose.
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