Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Bryan Anton, Seth Caplan, Elizabeth Carababas, Aaron S Cheung/Esto
Marcel Breuer, when designing his exhibition house in the MoMA sculpture garden in 1949, declared that he couldn’t find a single floor or table lamp suited to it. This frustration is long-lived for architectural designers. As Donald Judd titled his 1993 essay, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp.” But times have changed, as one can readily see this design week, with fine lamps around every corner.
Let us define things clearly. The job of a lamp is to direct and diffuse and channel light, usually from a bulb — which is almost always a brute object of industrial mass production that’s best concealed. This often isn’t done well. Isamu Noguchi, designer of perhaps the most beloved light-diffusing lamps, declared, “I am against glare, and all the more so in everyday life. It seems to me that certain new lights have turned conversation in living rooms into an interrogation.”
For designers, taking on that challenge is often pure fun — a means to experiment not just with material and form, but also mood, color, and emotion. It’s a particularly welcoming arena for new and fledgling designers; a release valve for architects weary of drawing plans for buildings that will take years to realize; and, from a commercial standpoint, perennially appealing and pragmatic — everyone could use a good lamp! Most of the lamps on view this week and next are works of sculpture in themselves, from a towering totemic floor lamp to a slight but dynamic nightlight. In materials ranging from resin to rubber, pine to polymers, the lamps we’ve collected here draw inspiration from skyscrapers, flowers, and molten lava.
First, a selection from the sixth annual Lamp Show organized by Head-Hi, the Fort Greene architecture and design bookstore and coffee shop, this time in collaboration with curator Stephen Markos of Superhouse. From that show, we have two picks.
Photo: Aaron S Cheung/Esto
Schonthal was inspired both by fragments that the sea leaves behind and the unpredictable refractions of light through water through which you tend to see that flotsam and jetsam in creating this lamp. After a start in metalworking and jewelry, she ventured into incorporating ceramics. The first time she fired the lamp, she found it warped by the kiln, and took this as artistic direction, disassembling, re-firing and then re-joining the stoneware, sterling silver, and epoxy clay portions. Mutable clay offers a contrast to precise silver, in a composition that has the curving voids reminiscent of Joan Lurie and Henry Moore.
Photo: Aaron S Cheung/Esto
LOT-EK, a studio run by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, whose projects span architecture, exhibition, and object design, commendably upcycles materials as often as they can. They’re particularly well-known for their reuse of shipping containers, a pursuit that might seem a world away from this tangerine slice of a lamp, but not when you grasp just what they were doing. When they found a discarded pile of spacer bands — the steel rings at the center of flatbed truck wheels — in New Jersey, the first thing they thought to make with them were lamps. They found that a rubber cast provided a happy opalescent contrast to its ultra-industrial look. Inside there’s a full 15-foot coil of linear LED which can be removed and replaced — simpler than changing a tire.
Photo: André Klotz
Verso and Espasso’s program, “Connections Across Time: Dualde Cornelsen,” forges all sorts of links between fields and generations. The DC Floor to Ceiling Lamp, a totemic creation by furniture designer Pali Xisto Cornelsen and architect Lucas Jimeno Dualde, pays homage to Pali’s father, Jejo Cornelsen, a versatile artist whose credits include sculpture, art and even album designs for Gilberto Gil and Carlos Mendes. The lamp, which he refers to as the Jejo lamp, draws upon the form and the natural-dye colorsof the wooden stacked sculptures that the elder Cornelsen began making in Norfolk, Connecticut while visiting Pali from Brazil. The piece itself was a genuine collaboration; the wooden elements were Pali’s work, and the shade is by Dualde, who is an architect and furniture designer.. The lamp is striking by itself, and among the arrangement of other works by Jejo, but it also takes advantage of the sole luxury that many New Yorkers have but seldom exploit – tall ceilings.
Photo: Christian Borger
Rarify, which has made its name unearthing and vending splendid modern furniture (and equipping notable sets that need it, like Severance) is venturing into its first exclusive collaboration with an independent designer, Brooklyn-based Christian Borger — a follow-up to its 2025 collaboration with Gantri and USM Heller. Borger’s modular system, grounded in previous lamp studies, often turns light sideways, with laser-cut aluminum panels bearing curvaceous shades of Gantri Made, plant-based polymers to light up whatever you might wish.
Photo: Elizabeth Carababas
Ceramicah, the LA-based lighting studio of Micah Blyckert and Alexandra Cadiz, has produced an admirable number of elegant toadstool-like ceramic lamps; they have ventured to a different form and material for their Cuadra Line. These are stacked wood or white oak sheets punctuated with portholes and lined inside with parchment paper. The line is inspired directly by Mexico City Airport’s Terminal 2 by Serrano Arquitectos. The form is simple, to be sure, but their variations, which come in tabletop, standalone, and sconce form, provide a whole city of light to a space.
Photo: Jack DeMarzo/
Brooklyn-based woodworker Luke Malaney revels in untreated wood and its combinations, a habit that’s especially welcome in the immensely kinetic Greyhound Lamp. Abandoned Greyhound stations were his inspiration, but the end result is far less depressing. He began following the natural grain of a vertical smooth piece of ash, then doubled this post with a piece of cherry, left nubbly on one side. It’s angled and balanced by a pine boulder at the base, and topped by slices of hammered copper. Even the pull is a sort of walnut of wood. None of it is polished or milled beyond recognition, and it feels like a Georges Braque drawing come to life.
Photo: Simon Johns Studio
Here is another wooden lamp, but one inspired by volcanoes. Simon Johns is a southern Quebec-based designer who began working with wood, then circled away to stone and metals, and has returned to combine them here. It’s a tweak of a prior version encased in aluminum and featuring a stone “shade”; in the Magma Lamp, douglas fir makes up the shell. Clay fragments sit in geological layers beneath a chunk of glass, which true to its name looks, lit from behind, like lava.
Photo: Bryan Anton
Jaye Kim, a Brooklyn-based designer, has produced a variety of ceramics, with lamps among them. The table lamp at Tangent is a new direction. She had intended to make a ceramic base and shade, but ended up creating a fabric shade for the sake of a lighter look. The soft material complements a base that also evokes folds and ribbon-like loops in clay. Squint and there’s also traces of what look like well-worn candle wax in the clay base, a clever gesture to another era of light-making.
Photo: Robert Rieger
Tobia Scarpa, architect and designer, who is the son of Venetian architect and design god Carlo Scarpa was summoned back by FLOS at age 91 to tweak the design of his Seki-Han, a lamp originally issued from 1963 to 1966. It’s easy to see why they would bring this, now the sole wooden lamp in their catalogue, out of retirement. The lamp’s title is drawn from the Japanese for “red rice,” which has a celebratory association. Tobia Scarpa didn’t just bless a reissue, but altered the piece in a number of ways. It’s a bit taller and sits on a lighter iron base. The light source is no longer a fluorescent tube but an LED. The two wooden blades are now made of lacquered ash and they can rotate, like a tower fan that emits light instead of air. But its silhouette retains the irresistible sleekness of the 1963 original.
Photo: Yuxuan Huang
Huang, based in Brooklyn, has produced a series of lamps drawing upon her childhood memories in Southwest China, utilizing Chinese lantern and paper techniques. This lamp features a painted, misty mountain crafted with washes of mineral pigments and ink on layered mulberry paper, sealed with shellac. And there is a twist: the base is carved from salvaged wood from 19th century houses and churches in New York and Philadelphia, a vestige of yet another past epoch.
Photo: Alvaro Uribe
Alvaro Uribe has usually been given to solid sculptural design but took a different course with Spire Fold. This lamp was inspired by the Spire as we know it, SOM’s 1 World Trade Center, which he watched rise over the years. The diamond form is accentuated here in a 3D-printed shade made out of PETG Plastic, complex geometry rendered in a light moire pattern where contemporary architecture meets the Japanese lantern. This is on view at Shine, an exhibition featuring lights by 70 designers from Joe Doucet to Liyang Zhang at the Seaport, curated by Harry Allen and presented in partnership with Cool Hunting.
Photo: Andi Kovel
Andi Kovel has made use of milk glass previously. With the Eclipse Lamp, the material is hand-blown to achieve a balance of opacity that spreads light and enlivens the snowglobe-like landscape it contains inside. Inspired, she says, by “the quiet drama of celestial events,” each piece is unique, with some interplay of moon, clouds, sky, mountains, or more abstract but enticing forms. The socket is threaded within.
Photo: Seth Caplan
As Soft Geometry, Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary have worked together as an Indian design practice dedicated to making things by hand. From last year’s Long-Haired Sconces, flexible forms of hemp-lime composite that most resembled braids of hair, they have moved on to another familiar shape from childhood with their Flower Sconces. They were inspired both by the 2023 California Superbloom and memories of doodling flowers while growing up in India. The petals are cast resin in different hues, the pistil is a glass globe. The cord, that utilitarian distraction on most lamps, makes perfect sense as a green stem.
Photo: Seth Caplan
Photo: David Sierra
The Philadelphia design collective DUDD HAUS has turned to a particularly dim corner of lighting: the nightlight. Long a utilitarian device to avoid stubbing your toe or tripping over the dog, it has not received much sustained design attention. But this year’s open call for designs (the show, fittingly, is called DUDD LITE) produced over 400 expressive submissions that used Bocci’s 22 system, electrical devices that can accommodate nearly any finish. There are masks, candles, seashells, and even a rat along the walls at Future Perfect’s townhouse in the West Village. It’s hard to select just one, but Alexandre P. Manko’s Lux demonstrates some of the possibilities. It provided a means to use scientific glassware, namely a borosilicate glass graham coil condenser, in a mad scientist’s contraption.