May 16, 2004
Rotare: A Smart, Sexy Lighting Fixture
When Susan Hakkarainen, the president and founder of Ivalo Lighting, set out to create a new line of fixtures, she created the kind of brief that designers salivate over. “The charge was, design me an architectural element,” she says. “Don’t worry about the technical elements. We’ll make it work.” The first result of this liberating […]
When Susan Hakkarainen, the president and founder of Ivalo Lighting, set out to create a new line of fixtures, she created the kind of brief that designers salivate over. “The charge was, design me an architectural element,” she says. “Don’t worry about the technical elements. We’ll make it work.” The first result of this liberating brief is Rotare, a graceful metal fixture that looks like the bows of two ships fused in the middle.
Designed by the emerging architectural firm of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, Rotare curves from a vertical at the ends to a horizontal in the center; it hangs suspended from four “i-cables” that eliminate the need for a power cable. The sexy, curved form required CATIA software to execute and was fabricated in a Detroit metalworking shop that specializes in concept and racing cars. “All of our fabricators come from either the automotive, aerospace, or healthcare fields,” says Hakkarainen, whose father, Joel Spira, founded the lighting control company Lutron.
Hakkarainen—who obviously has lighting in her very DNA—has also approached four other design teams to create fixtures for Ivalo: Winka Doubledam of Archi-tectonics; David Bergman of Fire & Water; William Pedersen (no relation to this reporter) and Rob Goodwin of Kohn Fox & Pedersen; and Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle of Contemporary Architecture Practice. All five lines will be introduced in the next 16 months.
