Lucellino LED lamp, Ingo Maurer, Germany, 1992/2015. This design icon from the early 1990s is one of Ingo Maurer's best known lighting designs. Its name is a clever portmanteau - in Italian, "luce" means light and "uccellino" translates as little bird. Its form is quite literally a proprietary light bulb with affixed hand-crafted goose feather wings that has been "tethered" to its thin brass flexible support wire support and soldered to its thin red power cord. The base plate of Lucellino LED is equipped with a touch sensor for switching and continuous dimming. Lucellino is included in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
With Lucellino, Ingo Maurer's treatment of the bulb form is an integral part of the lamp's overall aesthetic. Employing elaborate LED technology that was developed collaboratively by Ingo Maurer and Toshiba Materials, the goal was to update Lucellino by creating an LED bulb form that mimics the aesthetics associated with the frosted bulb of the original design yet also dims like an incandescent bulb. The resulting TRI-R bulb is a technological masterpiece and is difficult to distinguish from the bulb used in the lamp's original design. It's manufactured exclusively for Ingo Maurer and can only be used in Lucellino LED. Left photo from Ingo Maurer illustrates the first batch of Lucellino LED lamps being produced.
Delight lamp, Frans van Nieuwenborg and Martijn Wegman, Ingo Maurer, Germany, 1980. Like Lucellino, this fabulously conceptual design is another Ingo Maurer icon. Delight is such a simple, clever piece... it features a special heat-resistant white fiberglass square cIoth with an integrated bulb socket in the center around which the soft cloth with its luxe woven subtle shimmer can be "draped" in various ways by the user to create an "illuminated object" - functioning in this photo as a table lamp.
With its integrated loop tab on one side, Delight can also be hung on a wall functioning like a sconce - gravity also assists with the way in which the cloth drapes. For many years, the manufacturer recommended a frosted incandescent 40 watt E27 base bulb for use with the lamp. With the advent of LED technology, clearly other bulb options (and associated resulting aesthetics) are now available. Delight is included in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Switch Modern has just started adding Ingo Maurer lighting designs to its website. For more information about either Lucellino LED or Delight as well as any other extraordinary lamp manufactured by Ingo Maurer, please contact us at 404-605-0196 or info@switchmodern.com
