Lighting in the Modern Era

In 1953 the journalist and publisher Alexander Koch published his book 'Neuzeitliche Leuchten' (Lighting in the Modern Era). Nowadays Koch's then selection of lighting by international designers and manufacturers seems truly visionary.

Koch presents a spectrum of diverse designs, whose origins lay not only in the addition of basic geometrical shapes as with the pre-war avant-gardists, but also in the respective temperaments of the different countries of origin. It is very apparent that after the war America, Scandinavia and Italy exerted a strong influence on designs hitherto rather dominated by Bauhaus purism in Germany. An organic design concept, emancipated from the ideal of a machine and inspired by artists such as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo, along with new materials and manufacturing techniques, gave rise to designs with enormous innovative energy.

As in architecture, one can also speak of an 'international style' with regard to lighting design, whose protagonists are now amongst the designer elite of the twentieth century. Despite the new orientation towards linear, dynamically flowing forms that cross national borders, diversity within the sculptural appear- ance of lighting itself remains important as the primary design goal, along with the effect the lighting exudes. The space-defining quality of modern era lighting has been dedicated its own chapter, in which interiors by e.g. Richard Neutra and Walter Gropius testify to the scenographic potential of the new lighting culture.