Cool Hunting

Among the newest, hottest creations in town at the London Design Festival this year, we happily noted that others were taking time to celebrate an old classic—albeit in new ways of course. Anglepoise, a lamp that's required little tweaking in the over 70 years it's been in production, is one of the brands that's found ways to playfully reinterpret their classic design as of late.

At 100% Design, Anglepoise presented two new versions of the lamp by British designer Kenneth Grange to celebrate 70 years of the original. Type1227 subtly reinterprets the original, while Type1228 adds a handsome green shade, showing how effective subtle changes in form and color can be.

Radically different, young British designer Anthony Dickens' variation, the Anglepoise Fifty, celebrates the original's form and maintains functionality. The half lamp was commissioned for a new range called "Anglepoise Play" that will "be aimed at a younger audience and represent all Anglepoise products that have a playful side to them." Anthony says "The idea came to freeze it at fifty degrees, cast it like an old archaeological relic, strip it of production complexity and shape it into something new which still retained a functionality and personality but added a heightened playfulness."

Across town, the kids were getting crazy with the Anglepoise theme at the Aram Gallery. Students from the Royal College of Art (70 of them) were given a brief by course director Ron Arad to "discover a new type of task light; one that would inherit the mantle from the Anglepoise, and that would be equally iconic." We loved Tiago de Oliviera Martins de Fonseca’s completely antithetical design. Dubbed "No Angle, No Poise," still retaining the form of the iconic design but changing its function by using rubber rather than metal and deliberately letting it slump from its usual elegantly-structured posture. (Pictured at right.)