Current Trends in Decorative Lighting
Are we all designers these days? We live in a time when the need for individuality and personality is more marked than ever before. Everyday, we establish our own identity in the style of clothes we choose to wear, in the way we create the world we live in and in our own homes. Consciously or unconsciously we ask ourselves what suits us, how we see ourselves and what the points of reference between different objects are for us.The age of the homogenous furnishing style is long gone. These days, living is a collage of different styles and special features. There's not just one trend anymore. Individuality and style mix are in. Personal, individual style evolves from a dynamic epicentre of taste, to which the most diverse influences and inspirations gravitate. The solutions offered by designers are as multiform as our requirements are individual. We live in a kind of "Design plus" society, which calls for the cross-over and combination of disciplines as well as ever more precise concepts of the characteristics of objects.
The range of products on show at the upcoming Light+Building, International Trade Fair for Architecture and Technology (6 to 11 April 2008 in Frankfurt am Main) and parallel Trend Forum, with its visual presentations of what interiors of the future might look like, demonstrates to the retail trade, designers, interior designers and architects that products are becoming ever more individual and offer more, in terms of impressive features, than just functionalism in its pure form. Products contain a plethora of emotional references and symbolism, which challenge us to take a closer look.
Design takes its inspiration from a context, which is becoming ever more widespread. At present, this is all too apparent in lighting design. Decorative lighting is looking for new strategies, design approaches and aesthetic programmes, from which a broad diversity of solutions result. For example, a range of different protagonists symbolise the trends identifiable at present.
Lighting by Patricia Urquiola and Marcel Wanders, among others, demonstrates that design is anything but objective, that designs are firmly inspired by personal experiences and biographical moments. Clarification of their objects requires a reversion to the history of design, which continues to flow, with interruptions and in a different form, from personal memories and references, coupled with an imaginative and highly energetic creative passion. Through this, disciplines are sampled and familiar typology called into question. Like the lighting objects of Joris Laarmann, Enrico Franzolini and Vicente Garcia Jimenez, Urquiola and Wanders' hanging lamps seem almost to hark back to the chandelier in opulence, albeit in a new guise.
The old master of light, Ingo Maurer, charts a totally different design course. In his LED objects, he combines design and technology in a unique way, time and again producing amazing, poetic effects in consequence. Maurer's lighting objects tell stories, bursting with imagination, always surprising and exciting. A powerful fascination for technical innovation and an interest in exploiting it to create new aesthetic and decorative solutions is articulated in this work. His current project, an LED wall panel, a wallpaper embellished with LEDs generates a perceptive experience, which is both unconventional and confusing. Until now, one had associated three dimensional lighting objects with decorative lighting. Ingo Maurer breaks with this principle transferring it to the two-dimensional. The light becomes part of the architecture, a wall in its own right. Light is no longer reduced to a single source, which illuminates the room. The architecture becomes a light source in its own right. What may at first glance appear to be a reversal of the light, at second glance turns out to be exactly the opposite. In this way, Maurer over-accentuates the light, allowing it to dominate.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between decorative and technical lighting. Bilateral, ongoing innovation influences development in both categories. For example, the basic concept for Axel Meise's mass-produced lamps is technical but they distance themselves from this by pursuing decorative objectives. Whereas solitary objects have long been associated with decorative lighting for the private living space, they also include lighting module systems. A similar ambivalence is also apparent in Yves Béhar's designs for Herman Miller. LED office lighting breaks new ground in technical lighting and acquires a highly decorative and exceptionally elegant quality. Yves Béhar is just one example of how technical and functional tasks can be achieved through impressive aesthetic power, with the ultimate result that an astonishingly different kind of beauty is created than would be generally expected of traditional technical lighting.
Whilst art apparently combines unhesitatingly with neighbouring disciplines as apparent in the work of Olafur Eliasson, for example, which distances itself from all museum-like exhibition conventions and consequently from the concept of a clearly delineated piece of art and creates new forms of art experience, design still rigidly insists on a demarcation line, although increasingly this is apparently being set aside. The lighting of someone like Paul Cocksedge features a highly artistic process, which questions the principles of lighting. He experiments with Gin Tonic and with coloured optical lights, vases which start to light up when a flower is placed in them or with glass neon gas filled tubes into which electricity is conducted and which emit a red light as a result of chemical processes. The function of the light itself takes a backseat to poetic statement and design opens up the sphere of art. This development is also apparent in the project of Florian Ortkrass and Stuart Wood, who roll their "Light Roller" over surfaces leaving a fluorescent image on them. Here the light source is initially as hard to identify as in Paul Cocksedge's work.
Our conventional understanding of light is also called into question, when one looks at the phenomenal productions of lighting designer Mario Nanni. Nanni is seen as Italy's answer to Ingo Maurer and is just as magical and innovative in his approach to lighting. It isn't always easy to decide whether he is more concerned with glorifying light or paying tribute to shade. One thing is certain – he plays with our perception and in doing so draws the entire space in. Expressed profanely, Mario Nanni simply illuminates architecture. However, what he does goes far beyond this. He uses light as a building material, employs it as an architectural element. Consequently the focus is now on the product, the light, no longer on the object, the lamp, with all its presentational possibilities and full poetic force.
It is clear to see that lighting design is developing in totally different directions, none of them close to becoming a trend but aimed instead at meeting our personal preferences and individual furnishing ideas. These present us with a variety of approaches to light, resulting from totally different objectives, ideas and processes. These days, more than ever before, decorative lighting required interpretation because, behind the external shine, it makes profound statements about the stance, origin and value system of design.
We are only just learning that conventional categories and classifications are increasingly open to question but are already facing the next revolution in lighting, namely OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode), which promises a completely new generation of lamps and lighting objects. It remains to be seen what illuminating answers this development will provide as far as future design is concerned.
