A lexander Lervik, a Swede, knows about the gloom of long dark winters. So, as a designer striving to bring light to dim spaces, he has come up with illuminated versions of products that never glowed before: a door handle fitted with a light-emitting diode, or LED, that shines bright red when the door is locked, and an illuminated children's swing.
For Lervik, light "changes the identity of a product and gives you more to work with, more expression."
He is not alone in his fascination with light. Designers and manufacturers in many countries are now using miniaturized LED technology to wire everything from kitchen and bathroom fixtures to furniture and floor tile. Light is emerging as the medium of the moment.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
This fall, the German home products company Villeroy & Boch will begin selling Light Tiles -- ordinary-looking glazed clay tiles equipped with an LED device -- in the US. Hit a wall switch and the tiles, which will cost US$75 to US$100 each and come with a 60-page installation manual, glow blue, white or amber.
At a time when high-tech gadgets fill every corner of the house, "people are receptive to light applications that go beyond ceiling lamps and sconces," said Rick Crane, tile sales manager for Villeroy and Boch.
Mixing the elements of light and water is popular with many companies exploring this new field, but the combination comes at a price. Neve Rubinetterie, a small Italian faucet maker based outside Milan, will soon start selling a product in the US called the Brick Glas. It is a faucet embedded in a rectangular block of transparent or frosted Plexiglas, which is lighted from below by a low-voltage LED.
The faucet costs about US$1,500, which may be a bit steep for the opportunity to brush your teeth in the dark. But it is not as expensive as showering with light.
Ondine, a luxury shower systems company in City of Industry, California, sells the Electric Light shower head, with 270 spray channels wired with fiber optic cables and a halogen light, for between US$2,500 (for the chrome version) and US$15,000 (24-carat gold). The color of the light is
adjustable.
"If you like blue because it's more soothing, you can set the head to that," said Patty Gatto, marketing director at Ondine. The shower head was designed as a form of chromatherapy, which assigns healing
properties to each color of the light spectrum and which has become a popular marketing tool for light product makers.
Designers are jumping on the
chromatherapy bandwagon, whether or not they are true believers. Jan Puylaert, a Dutch designer who runs an Italian design
company called Wet, says he's not really a New Age type, but he believes that light gives you "a nice energy and some invisible comfort, like plants."
Puylaert's contributions to such comforts are a bathtub and a wash basin, made of lightweight polyethylene, which come with either a halogen light or an LED, and sell for between US$1,400 and US$2,500 for the tub, and US$250 and US$500 for the basin.
Torsten Neeland, a German designer based in London, says light is about
"stimulating the senses," even when its source is something as mundane as a coffee table. During London design week events last week, he showed such a table, the Oranienburg (US$2,350) with three elliptical Corian tops that can swivel out from a
pedestal base. A fluorescent light on the base casts a pink glow between the layers. The effect, Neeland said, "reflects the
power of color."
These new forms of illumination are popular with consumers, manufacturers say, but some design-world purists are less impressed. Brooke Hodge, the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, says in many of these cases, adding an element like light is "an odd embellishment" because it doesn't have a function.
"Light is a pleasant thing and you can use it to change the mood and atmosphere, like those watches with different colored faces," she said. "But you have to ask, `what does it do? Why is it there?'"
The push to illuminate everything isn't all frivolous, according to Lervik. He got the idea for the Brighthandle door handle, which sells in the US for about US$150, while gazing at a "do not disturb" sign in a hotel. "I thought, it might be possible to design the function of that sign into the door, to use light to communicate the same thing," Lervik explained.
It may be simply the beauty of light that is attracting so many designers to it. After all, said Leni Schwendinger, a lighting artist in New York City who is working on a project to illuminate the Coney Island
parachute jump, people love light because "it fills the eye with brightness and delights."
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
“China wants to unify with Taiwan at the lowest possible cost, and it currently believes that unification will become easier and less costly as time passes,” wrote Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然) and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs (“Why China Waits”) this month, describing how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is playing the long game in its quest to seize Taiwan. This has been a favorite claim of many writers over the years, easy to argue because it is so trite. Very obviously, if the PRC isn’t attacking Taiwan, it is waiting. But for what? Hsiao and Glaser’s main point is trivial,
May 18 to May 24 Gathered on Yangtou Mountain (羊頭山) on Dec. 5, 1972, Taiwan’s hiking enthusiasts formally declared the formation of the “100 Peaks Club” (百岳俱樂部) and unveiled the final list of mountains. Famed mountaineer Lin Wen-an (林文安) led this effort for the Chinese Alpine Association (中華山岳協會). Working with other experienced climbers, he chose 100 peaks above 10,000 feet (3,048m) that featured triangulation points and varied in difficulty and character. The list sparked an alpine hiking craze, inspiring many to take up mountaineering and competing to “conquer” the summits. A common misconception is that the 100 Peaks represent Taiwan’s 100 tallest
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
RSS