Mayice and her Filament lamp
We want light to have a shape, say Marta Alonso and Imanol Calderón, architects of Mayice . The light obeys, bending or stretching into a thread as it reflects off the thin glass walls of its Filament lamp. An apparently discontinuous thread of light, which generates an optical effect mysterious almost mystical.
In the twelfth century, the abbot Suger of Saint-Denis transformed his temple into a transparent universe through light, filtered through the stained glass windows: lux new , a new light loaded with meaning.
Like him, Marta and Imanol started from the observation of the passage of light through materials. They experimented from the practice of architecture with the projections that it traced on the walls and on the pavement.
They were looking for ways curvy, organic, what they found in the blown glass of the Royal Farm Factory . In a facility in Villa Necchi , in Milan, on the occasion of the Expo 2015 , created a watery and marine atmosphere by combining globular shapes with hydrogenated syrup . Its bluish movement evoked the pendulum of the seabed.
Mayice's installation at Villa Necchi
The collaboration with the Real Fábrica de Cristales led to an unexpected proposal. Mayice was invited to create a lamps collection reflect the spirit of the institution. Imanol and Marta investigated in the deposits . The Royal Factory preserves more than 4,500 steel molds to produce oil lamps, glasses, cups and pitchers. With the help of master glassmakers, they combined these pieces until they reached profiles that alternate between concave and convex.
But, by introducing a conventional light bulb, the nuances derived from the process and the essential value of La Granja glass were lost: its transparency. Together with engineers and craftsmen, they experimented until the light source for which the piece, backlit , accurately project cold cuts and volumes, in tribute to master glassmakers.
The result excited the great designer Rossana Orlandi . From her Milanese oracle, she proposed to carry out a horizontal piece that gravitated on the table.
Mayice at the Farm, where they experimented with engineers and artisans
As the shapes were stretched out and thinned, the thread of light revealed within the crystal took on intensity . That filament gave the piece its name. Its immaterial, light consistency provokes, like the space of Abbot Suger's temple, a emotional response which affirms its artistic nature. The light keeps its symbolic Power, which is transferred to the functional sphere of the luminaire. The technology is hidden.
The nuanced light projected by its Filamento lamps envelops in a warm halo. there is a spirit cozy in the atmosphere that expands in every corner, with every object, with every piece of furniture, with every piece or person that inhabits the space. A luminous reflection, both of light and of ideas, that multiplies in the shapes of its shadows.
as it says Tanizaki in its In Praise of Shadow: "The beautiful is not a substance in itself, but only a drawing of shadows, a play of chiaroscuro produced by the juxtaposition of different substances." An oriental substance and sensitivity that Mayice does not escape. Not surprisingly, her next destination is the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute , in China, where her new work will be exhibited. A new light that will manifest through the delicacy and subtlety of silk and their flickering shadows.
Inmanol and Marta experimented a lot until reaching the final result