BURNING BRIGHT
This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has its share of charming hand-blocked wallpapers, embroidered throw pillows, and driftwood end tables, but what shines most brightly are the LED light fixtures. LED technology is advancing so rapidly that each year brings lights that are more energy-efficient, longer lasting, less costly, and with improved light quality. LED’s are so much more smarter and smaller (about an eighth of an inch in diameter) than incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, that they might do for lighting what steel did for construction – bring about an entirely new model for design.
And just as the first wave of steel-frame buildings were clad in stone panels to give the sound appearance of a building, most LED light fixtures are designed with shades and baffles that, primarily, give the sound appearance of a lamp. Vendors at ICFF are cloaking LED diodes in nostalgic fittings, with shades made in warm materials (dark woods, textured metals, cardboards, felt), as if trying to soften the technology before permitting it into our living rooms. One Swedish company even sells an LED pendant that looks like a bare incandescent bulb.
Only a few designers seem interested in exploiting the tiny size of the bulbs. Unsentimental designers tend to line the diodes up in lines, like a tape, or add a long, cylindrical lens to them, turning the brilliant pinpoints into light sabers. But there are hints of what lies ahead. One English fabricator is showing wallpapers that have LED diodes integrated within their baroque patterns, and one artist is showing lamps made of clouds of them, that resemble models of the atom more than chandeliers. They get at the potentially revolutionary question: what does an LED light fixture look like?