Lodes is launching its first collaboration with Ron Arad, the internationally renowned artist, architect and designer, known for his iconic industrial pieces that have won multiple awards and been exhibited in the world’s most prestigious institutions. The result is Cono di Luce – a lamp that marries Lodes’ technical know-how with Arad’s artistic flair. The company saw in Ron Arad a figure who blends art, architecture and design. With his disruptive approach, Arad is able to uncover new realms in which objects break out of their typical typologies. With this in mind, Lodes aimed to not only overcome challenges, but to embrace them as part of the design process to create the end product. Before embarking on the design phase, Lodes set the designer a challenge: to use borosilicate glass to design an iconic object. Arad consequently opted for a slender, truncated cone shape as the archetype, with a light source placed on top, hence its name Cono di Luce, meaning cone of light.
A continuous exchange between the company and the designer enabled a new design path to be found. Lodes met Arad’s with an innovative use of PCB technology. Together, they harnessed this technology to translate its aesthetic and expressive qualities, creating a pattern that became the lamp’s graphic motif. Lodes’ technical capabilities are clearly demonstrated in the development process. Lodes was able to transfer Arad’s intuitive response to the brief, as shown in his initial sketch, into a real lamp – finding a technical solution that solved critical issues while simultaneously fulfilling several functions. Thanks to Lodes’ expertise and wider problem solving skills so synonymous with Italian design thinking, the company was able to find an innovative solution that offers an affordable product with high luminous efficiency.
Cono di Luce is a lamp characterised by a transparent Pyrex cone that houses a printed circuit board (PCB) inside and a frame, also made of PCB, but with a greater thickness to provide structural support for the lamp. The PCB is the result of a process that includes 33 steps and several layers composed of fiberglass and copper for the LED chip electric circuits, which by nature have both translucent and opaque areas. A sheet of fiberglass, which is extremely thin, flexible, and insulating, on which a copper path is smeared, acts as a conductor of the electrical polarity, which on reaching the LED allows them to emit light. Lodes’ intuition was to understand the possibility of exploiting the decorative potential of the material’s degree of translucency, to arrive at the design characterised by stripes, based on the artist’s drawing. This allowed Arad to play with areas of dark and light bands, and with the moiré effect given by the overlapping of the stripes. Lodes was able to employ this aesthetic to design an electrical circuit connecting more than 200 LED chips.
The frame, also designed by Lodes, consists of a white rigid PCB that performs three functions: refracting light so that the luminous effect of the lamp can be uniform, connecting electric circuits that give power to the LEDs and finally, acting as a mechanical suspension of the product itself. In continuity with the CMF Lodes, there will also be a third version which features a grey finish on the inside and a gold finish on the outside, obtained through the deposition of gold, to give the product its preciousness. The result is a powerful lamp in its seemingly simple design. When turned on, the product reveals its full decorative capacity – an optical item made of light, shadows and superimpositions, the work of the Arad’s creative vision and Lodes’ ability to master and manage technology.
