14 Standout Lamps From New York's Design Week

A lamp’s role is to direct, diffuse, and channel light from a concealed industrial bulb. Poor execution often leads to glare and harsh illumination that disrupts everyday comfort and conversation. Designers treat lamp-making as an experimental outlet for exploring material, form, mood, color, and emotion, and it offers a practical, broadly appealing product category. Recent design showcases present lamps as sculptural objects, ranging from towering floor lamps to dynamic nightlights. Materials span resin, rubber, pine, and polymers, with inspirations drawn from skyscrapers, flowers, and molten lava. The selection includes works from a lamp show organized by a design bookstore and coffee shop in collaboration with a curator.

"Marcel Breuer, when designing his exhibition house in the MoMA sculpture garden in 1949, declared that he couldn't find a single floor or table lamp suited to it. This frustration is long-lived for architectural designers. As Donald Judd titled his 1993 essay, "It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp." But times have changed, as one can readily see this design week, with fine lamps around every corner."

"Let us define things clearly. The job of a lamp is to direct and diffuse and channel light, usually from a bulb - which is almost always a brute object of industrial mass production that's best concealed. This often isn't done well. Isamu Noguchi, designer of perhaps the most beloved light-diffusing lamps, declared, "I am against glare, and all the more so in everyday life. It seems to me that certain new lights have turned conversation in living rooms into an interrogation.""

"For designers, taking on that challenge is often pure fun - a means to experiment not just with material and form, but also mood, color, and emotion. It's a particularly welcoming arena for new and fledgling designers; a release valve for architects weary of drawing plans for buildings that will take years to realize; and, from a commercial standpoint, perennially appealing and pragmatic - everyone could use a good lamp! Most of the lamps on view this week and next are works of sculpture in themselves, from a towering totemic floor lamp to a slight but dynamic nightlight."

Read at Curbed