Personal Light – GamFratesi design new lamp for Louis Poulsen
Celebrating Louis Poulsen’s philosophy of designing to shape light and inspired by the classic virtues of Danish design, Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi, who make up GamFratesi, the most stirring design duo of our time, have designed a lamp dubbed Yuh.
With an impressive knowledge of design history and inspired by Poul Henningsen’s philosophy about light, combined with Arne Jacobsen’s geometric shapes, GamFratesi pay homage to the legends and add their own characteristic aesthetic playfulness to the new Yuh Lamp.
“We are very inspired by the AJ lamp design by Arne Jacobsen. There is something very striking about its geometry. It is angled, but the shade is designed in such a way that one part of it is always aligned with the floor in one way or another. It is extremely sculptural, but also very geometric,” says Stine Gam.
“It is a piece of architecture,” adds Enrico Fratesi. Asked about the collaboration, Rasmus Markholt, idea and design director at Louis Poulsen, says, “For me, collaborating with GamFratesi was an obvious choice. They are a good fit for our line of creative partnerships with their strong contemporary aesthetics and shared values rooted in the Danish design tradition.”
Personal light
One of the essential features of the lamp is that it is personal. The lamp is flexible and takes up very little space. It rotates, rises and drops, illuminating and creating ambience in the required area. A lamp created just around you.
“Our biggest challenge was to design the lamp so that it could be moved in several directions. We worked with three different types of movement on the axis: inclination, rotation and up and down. This made it very complex. It was a huge challenge, but there is a fantastic team of engineers at Louis Poulsen with whom we had a very good working relationship,” says Enrico Fratesi.
The lamp provides direct glare-free downward light. The angle of the shade can be adjusted to optimise light distribution. The slim opening at the top of the shade provides soft, ambient upward illumination.
“Our desire to incorporate a diffuser in the lamp stems from our respect for Poul Henningsen’s work as well as from our appreciation of indirect light. We like the fact that you do not see the light source and are not dazzled. With a diffuser, the light source is concealed, which we think makes the illumination very magical,” says Stine Gam.
Louis Poulsen debuted the new collaboration at this year’s Euroluce in Milan, with an out-of-the-ordinary stand design by GamFratesi. By creating an architectural structure inspired by Japanese paper art, GamFratesi sought to create an out-of-the-box space that makes visitors think about how cuts, lines and shapes affect light and create ambience.
