Birds Birds Birds Birds - Ingo Maurer (1992)
The poetry of light between art, technology and creativity.
Ingo Maurer has reinvented the way we look at light. Why? Because until now no one had ever associated the incandescent bulb with happiness (well, perhaps Edison did). His lampsmore than illuminating, they tell stories (it is not for nothing that he studied typography...).
Legend has it that one hungover evening he saw the light (oh illumination!) in a boarding house in Venice. He was seeing double, and lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, he fell in love with the naked bulb. It seemed to him the most beautiful thing in the world: "a glass box for a flash of light". His first lamp, Bulbcreated in 1966 was just that, a giant light bulb in tribute to Edison.
Then came the Lucellinoadding goose wings to light bulb. Pure poetry that soon opened the doors of the MOMA in New York, the Victorian & Albert Museum in London, the Dansk Design Centre in Copenhagen, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris or the Suntory in Osaka, among other temples of the contemporary design.
Birds Birds Birds Birds Birdsor its reduced version, BirdieIt could well be a poem by Brossa, a child's play that perfectly combines the highest technology with craftsmanship in a constant creative and innovative process. And when we say creative and constant, we mean that once at home, you can change and customise it to your liking, as the wire wiring can be twisted, bent or stretched until it has the shape you like.
And this time it's goose wings, but Maurer is a pioneer in the decontextualisation of objects, as in his designs he has used from bottles of Campari even spoons, soup cans, broken plates, rice papers...
In recent years it has been leading the LED revolution (Light Electric Diode), a cleaner and more sustainable source of light (but still very expensive for general consumption) with which it manufactures papers with light, furniture with light, and everything else you can imagine. I'm sure you will Ingo Maurer has already tried it. "Most of the lamp designers continues to produce the same type of object even though the energy sources change". Wow, and how right, isn't it?
