This article was originally published on Domus 1083, September 2023.

A tower of wooden boxes, stacked and interspersed with thin boards, from which a soft, discreet light shines as if from a lantern. The sculpture is the work of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), that “whimsical and ingenious old man of Taliesin”, inclined to “polygonal and expensive” constructions, as Gio Ponti described him in a 1941 editorial (Domus 235). 

“Polygonal” was his solution to achieve indirect light without resorting to glass or shades. A composition of forms with a delicate play of light and shadow, it recalls the atmospheres of Japanese houses, a country that the “whimsical” American had come to know through the surimono prints of which he was knowledgeable collector. In 1946, Giancarlo De Carlo told the readers of Domus (in issue 407) about the influence of Japanese art on Wright’s design idiom: his “eclectic, fantastic and often unexpected architecture” was filtered through the sensitivity of those Oriental artists – “the love of nature, the ability to arouse spiritual qualities in inanimate things” – and transferred into his temperament as an “American pioneer”, capable of achieving “a balance of organic forms” or indulging in “surprising disorder”. 

Wright’s first design of a light source concealed and split into superimposed polygons dates from the 1930s. The pendant lamp was conceived for a room with a high ceiling in the Taliesin complex, his home-studio in Wisconsin. In the 1950s, the architect returned to the design and developed it into a lamp with a stem and base. As can be seen from the archive drawing, the square shapes are interspersed with plywood strips and distributed in an apparently precarious balance, concealing the light sources that reverberate on the wood.

The ensemble of solids and voids also comes to life in a dialogue with natural light, which is captured on the fragmented surfaces and helps to define the domestic space, fostering the coveted synthesis between man and nature that for Wright was fulfilled in the house, the shelter, as he called it. Taliesin – as the lamp was to be called – must have particularly appealed to him, since he used it in his studio and designed a dining-room version for Mr and Mrs Sander, who commissioned the mahogany, burnt brick and glass house in Springbough, Connecticut. The Taliesin floor and table lamp is now produced by Yamagiwa, a historic Japanese company that has long collaborated with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Supported by 100 years of artisan carpentry, it offers Taliesin in cherry, walnut and oak.

Opening image: the Taliesin® 2 floor lamp by Frank Lloyd Wright reissued by Yamagiwa in 2023, in the cherry wood version.