5 September 2007
Last week was my first post in a series for 2Modern.com where I will focus on young Dutch and British designers. This week, I’ve come up with a product by the design studio of Designgedichtjes. Their name, as you can see, is hard to pronounce for the feeble American tongue. It’s meaning, however, is somewhat easier to understand: “Design” meaning design, and “gedichjtes” meaning short poems. Their work is worthy of this name. The designs this studio creates emphasize the making of well considered, simple, and poetic solutions to a problem such as lighting.
For instance, the Resin Lamp is as simple and finely crafted light as you would expect from Designgedichtjes. The lamp really looks spartan. It consists of a cord, a couple of light bulbs, and highly polished clear resin. Simple? Not quite. How will you change the bulbs on these lamps? Designgedichtjes overcomes this problem (somewhat) by developing light bulbs that consist of 5000 hour filaments, so a user will not be disappointed until long after the warranty wears out. Also, the design has cleverly concealed the wiring in the resin cube to the point where it is virtually invisible. Even the polished resin poses a problem due to its tempermental manufacturing technique. Resin tends to hold air pockets which ruin the prismatic effect of this light. I can only assume that the designers took several tries to get the mixture right in the casting process.
Beyond the the respect I have for Designgedichtjes in their ability to make some really complex solutions look simple, I also enjoy their homage to the work of Jeff Koons. Mr. Koons, as you may know, was famous for taking everyday objects like vacuum cleaners or (as in the picture shown above) basketballs and encasing them in simple, elegant glass cases as if the objects were as important as a painting by Picasso. Koons’ argument, I think, is that the simple items of human invention were as precious and important as any other piece of art, so why not consider these mundane items as art. Now, I can’t really say if Designgedichtjes had the same thought process as Koons , but the lamp definitely allows me to reconsider the form and cultural strength of the simple light bulb.
