For some 200 years Wiener Silber Manufactur have produced the finest silverware. Exquisite cutlery, table services, coffee pots and sugar bowls designed by both the firm's own craftsman and also developed in co-operation with external designers: works by leading protagonists of the Wiener Werkstätte such as Josef Hoffmann or Kolo Moser being joined over the decades by designs from and by the likes of Oswald Haerdtl, Otto Prutscher, Gregor Eichinger or Claesson Koivisto Rune. Yet regardless of designer or era, all created with the same attention to the finer details of design and construction. Recent Vienna Design Week Passionswege projects have continued this tradition seeing as they have perfectly proportioned and delicately constructed projects by the likes of Charlotte Talbot or Tomás Alonso.
With their 2014 Passionswege project Lausanne based design studio Big-Game, have put an end to this traditional focus on the finer elements of the silversmith's craft; yet with a product that exactly because it pushes ideas about what fine silverware is enhances the Wiener Silber Manufactur portfolio much more than it contradicts.
Taking their inspiration from Oswald Haerdtl's 1952 Martelé Bowl, and for all the way the silversmiths carefully hammer the form, Big-Game have designed a table/desk lamp which despite its delicate handwork provenance presents a very rough and ready industrial charm.
With a lamp shade resembling a well travelled and well used gold panner's pan the magic of the object is the way it utilises the reflective properties of silver to create a lamp which illuminates via indirect light: an LED shines onto the inner surface of the shade from below, and the light radiates out into the surrounding space. A tilt mechanism allowing the direction of illumination to be changed depending on required mood.
The charm of the design is that it leaves the silver unadulterated, makes use of the material, its properties and its emotional associations without asking it to actively participate in the object. One can enjoy it for the high quality handmade silver bowl it is.
Owing to the nature of the presentation in the immaculately illuminated Wiener Silber Manufactur showroom it is however difficult to judge just how the illumination comes across. How "good" it is. We assume however its good.
Less good is the lamps metal base. We like the contrast, like the industrial aesthetic, like the way it looks like the silver shade has been lazily clipped onto some pre-existing structure: just think it looks a little tooooo clunky, less like a carefully designed feature and more a quick fix. As if the design process hasn't quite run its course, hasn't yet found a material and scale it is happy with.
But as ever, what do we know.
And regardless of such considerations the lamp is not only a very good Passionswege project but a fascinating object for which we can see a great deal of potential.
