Floor lamps went from bulky, strapping creations to winsome concoctions that seemed to defy gravity.
Other types of lighting were redesigned as well, with flexibility as a key goal. While this ambitious lamp-sculpture resembles the vegetable for which it is named, it could just as easily be mistaken for an interplanetary probe. This pendant light featured layers and layers of aluminum leaves splayed out at cascading angles. One advertisement for these exclaims: “Pivot the heavy aluminum reflector in any direction-up, down or sideways, it throws the light where you need it.” A memorably wacky aluminum example was the PH Artichoke. Cone reading lamps with star-shaped cutouts were mounted on the walls of many bedrooms. Many conical shades were made of spun aluminum, a process improved during the war. Is it a sculpture, a light, or both? The PH Artichoke from Louis Poulsen brought a new art form to lighting designs made of layers of aluminum leaves-each diffusing the light in interesting ways-the pendant is once again popular in modern-minded homes.Īluminum increasingly found its way into lighting designs as well.
Later examples, which were influenced by Scandinavian design, appeared poised above pieces of gracefully curved wood. These shades were perched atop jumbled wire stands, or on solid-looking pieces of pottery (some of which doubled as planters). Not that lampshades looked so traditional-boasting, as they did, a gravid circumference, taller rise, and a host of patterns and designs intended to enhance the glow of the light traveling through them. Fiberglass, so successful on the bubble lamps, became de rigueur in more traditional lampshades, too. Technological advancements honed for the military could now be applied to consumer goods, and the dearth of metals after the war left people creatively embracing new substances. “The bubble lamps typified lighting design in houses,” says Stephen Van Dyk of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, “not only in their biomorphic, space-age shapes, but also their use of new technology.” Maybe it was their innovative use of fiberglass as a shade over a wire frame, or maybe it was their seeming homage to the phases of the moon-whatever their appeal, these bubbles had staying power. Now the chandelier suddenly appeared as…a bubble? George Nelson’s line of pendant lights (commonly known as bubble lamps), featuring sensuous, organic shapes-from perfect spheres, to cigars, to pregnant-looking diamonds-quickly became popular when the Herman Miller furniture company started producing them in the early 1950s. After centuries of designs based on oil or gas flames, there’d been minimal changes to its basic form-with most centering on the number of arms and color of glass. Take the common chandelier as an example.
Breaking TraditionĪ squadron of George Nelson bubble lamps appears to be flying in formation across a modern-day Modernica showroom. In Mid-Century Modern, author Cara Greenberg explains, “The members of our parents’ generation were all motivated by the same desire: to escape the stuffy, old-fashioned rooms of their own youths and be, as every young generation wants to be… ‘modern’.” Where lighting was concerned, modern meant a host of new options, most of them decidedly functional, fresh and new. Consumers had less practical reasons for wanting these designs, too. Spurred by the postwar economy, suburbia was growing across the United States, and the influx of smaller, more affordable, housing for returning GIs created a demand for fittings to accomodate the new, downsized footprint of the American Dream. Traditional furnishings-the heavy, ornate, and wooden items crowding Grandma’s house-were giving way to simpler, more streamlined creations. While many folks think of the 1950s as an era of conformity, in the realm of home decor a revolution of sorts was quietly taking place. The PH5 chandelier from Louis Poulsen had an otherworldly appearance-and an otherworldly glow, thanks to its ability to diffuse light both vertically and horizontally.
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