In the 1920s the modernists resolutely chose rationalisation in the changing technical arrangement of dwellings. Electric light was healthier, more hygienic and easier to maintain than the existing solutions. Gas lighting, after all, had to be maintained twice a week and petroleum lamps daily. They consumed much oxygen and could generate soot in cases of poor combustion. And even when citizens used incandescent lamps, they had the tendency to hang lampshades with textile around them for cosiness. Modernist architects, such as Le Corbusier, reacted against these dust traps and the reduction of light by leaving some lamps and fittings bare. Another acceptable and dustproof solution was a fixture in opal glass, usually spherical. In 1926 Hendrik Willem Gispen introduced with the Giso lamps a new form of lighting in the Netherlands. The Giso lamps were made of clear glass, covered with a very thin layer of opal glass. The ‘Giso glass’ let through more light than the usual opal glass.
The artificial lighting of factories in the interwar period consisted of hanging lamps with metal shades. Because Curt Fischer did not find this lighting for the workers in his Thüringer Werkzeug und Machinenfabrik IWA Ronneberger & Fischer optimal, he launched ‘lenklampen’, directable lights. These caught on and in November 1919 he founded Industrie Werk AUMA Ronneberger & Fischer, for the production of Midgard lamps. The model of 1919, no. 112, was a scissor lamp, which was fixed against a wall or column and had the advantage that it could be directed in all positions.
From 1920 onwards followed no. 113, to clamp on a table or bureau top. From 1922 the typical asymmetrical shade appeared. We see a no. 113 in the Meisterwohnung of Walter Gropius and in rooms of the students in the Bauhaus.
Bernard-Albin Gras developed from 1921 in France fixtures for industry, design offices and laboratories. They were examples of ingenious technique, assembled without screws or soldering. The steel lamps almost all had two joints, a ball joint and a round hinge in one plane. The lamps were quickly taken up by architects and interior architects such as Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Eileen Gray. Le Corbusier had several of them on the drawing tables of his bureau in the 35 Rue de Sèvres, which he occupied from 1924 until his death in 1965 (the photographs were taken by René Burri in 1959). Especially the table models with two rods were very successful, the no. 201 which could be screwed onto the edge of the top and the no. 205 with a conical base.
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Architect Huib Hoste, who after a collapse of a building site in 1926 with four victims lost his professorship in La Cambre and struggled with financial problems, founded together with his son Guy a furniture business in Antwerp. They also sold there the lamps of Gras. In 1931 Huib Hoste advertised them in the periodical Opbouwen, of which he was editor-in-chief.
He reacted in an accompanying article against indirect lighting by means of protruding cove mouldings so that the lamps are not visible, among other reasons because they are dust traps. He presented several versions of the Gras lamps, and more specifically the wall and ceiling lamps and those which were fastened with a hand screw to the worktop, no. 201. The bureau furniture which Hoste designed around 1932 for the shop of his son, the photographer Hans Hoste, was fitted with such a lamp.
Huib’s friend Gaston Eysselinck installed at least five Gras lamps in his own dwelling of 1932: two in his architect’s bureau, which were fixed against the ceiling, and three times no. 222 in the sitting room: one against the column between two windows, one against the wall with the dining corner and one beside the small bureau.
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The Peeters house of Gaston Eysselinck had from completion four wall spotlights: at the cosy corner, against the column in the bureau, and above the (now vanished) bureau tops in the children’s bedroom and the guest room. Two of them have come down to us: the scissor model no. 112 of Midgard.
