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Andrea Branzi's light fixture (courtesy Andrea Branzi) |
| Branzi's imaginative lighthearted, imaginative fixtures still
comform to a more serious ideology. by Laurie Attias Architect-theorist-historian-curator Andrea Branzi has always been a rebel, from the ideological vision he conceived as the founder of Archizoom to the garish, plastic-laminate kitsch he popularized as a member of Memphis. His recent series of light fixtures--while less irreverent than, say, Memphis-group projects like the marble-topped dresser lined with cheap, bright-colored lightbulbs--is nonetheless surprising and subversive. Whimsical wireless lamps that run on batteries, these lights have little in common with the elegant understatement of the Italian desk and table lamps so popular a decade ago. In some, Branzi creates unexpected juxtapositions of the sophisticated and humble, like the plain metal bucket that contains a delicate Chinese-paper lantern, or the softly glowing orbs of blown Murano glass that hang like stalactites from a bamboo pole. Others play off the idea of domestic comfort by appropriating the shapes of banal household objects, most strikingly in witty, freestanding lamps shaped like everyday cookware that probe the affinity between heat and light. Branzi's eccentric fixtures resemble cumbersome cast-iron pots you'd shove to the back of a cabinet. Holding rice-paper lamp shades that look like piles of mashed potatoes or lopsided soufflés, these black-metal frying pans and casseroles might also teasingly allude to notions of bad taste. Branzi's lighthearted, imaginative fixtures still conform to a more serious ideology: the absence of wires, cables, and cords acts as a metaphor for contemporary life, which the Florence-born, Milan-based designer describes as unconstrained, fluid, and free. "For me, the process of lightening and re-leasing corresponds to our current social condition, a condition in which ties to former ideologies have disappeared, in which we all become free, unburdened, 'wireless,' " he explains. "But we don't know what to do with this freedom." |
Keywords:
Andrea Branzi, light fixtures, lamp
