Alexander Lervik

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Ljuskultur-Enlightenment

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Enlightenment by Alexander Lervik

DESIGN

Enlightenment

ALEXANDER LER...

The designer and interior architect Alexander Lervik likes to surprise. The first time he did so was in 1998 with his graduation project 10 stools – 10 decades, an exhibition that toured around the world and has so far been seen by over one million people. And now he surprises again. Now with lighting design and 17 fixtures of both practical and experimental nature gathered under the name Enlightenment.

BALLET DANCER 2006 (below and to the right). LED technology gives this tube-shaped fixture a luminous outer shell and luminous end caps while the inside of the tube remains completely black. In the center of the tube's interior, a ballet dancer spins, illuminated by a fiber-optic light point.

If Alexander Lervik was retrospective when it came to the furniture design of the last century, he is now innovative and experimental in a way that is as playful as it is imaginative. Or how about making a floor lamp with a glowing lampshade but without a light bulb? Or a suspended pendant lamp in the form of a flat TV screen with a moving image of a light bulb? Or a table lamp with a 3D-printed shade consisting of a replica of Lervik's own brain created from a CT scan at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm?

— I allow myself to play, which might seem presumptuous in my role as a serious designer and interior architect. But the desire to play is important to me. That and the desire to experiment act as fuels that then also drive the commercial side of my work and make me better in my professional role.

SEES EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES IN LIGHT But light is not just play now. It is more serious than that. And in light, Alexander Lervik sees new and exciting opportunities:

— Light has such communicative possibilities and light has often been present in the products I have received the most attention for. With the new technology in the form of, among other things, LEDs and fiber optics, there is now an opportunity to communicate light in a completely new and different way.

LIGHTSWING SENSE 2004. Light swing in plastic equipped with LED technology. The designer got the idea of light in motion from a night photograph of a highway with car headlights and taillights as light and colored streaks in the dark.

TWIST 2007. This LED-equipped and twisted fixture concept consists of an aluminum profile that twists 180 degrees around its own axis. The light spreads in all directions, but with the greatest luminous flux directed downwards towards, for example, a table surface.

DARKNESS 2007. The floor lamp that astonishes. The LED-glowing shade confuses and gives the impression of a traditional light source. But no. Behind the lampshade, there is nothing.

As a designer, interior architect, and product designer, Lervik is constantly on the hunt for new forms of expression and new expressive possibilities. That hunt takes place in a rural idyll with wide fields and giant oaks out on the northern part of royal Djurgården, an environment one would not believe existed within the confines of the capital city. Here, near Wärdshuset Stora Skuggan, Alexander has set up his design studio in a former barn from the 1860s with a gravel parking area in front of the red-painted row of buildings and a duck pond and lawns on the other side.

When Alexander Lervik seriously surprised the world for the first time, it was with his graduation project from Beckmans design school in Stockholm. By extracting the distinctive features of each decade's design history and summarizing them in a self-designed stool, he created the exhibition 10 stools – 10 decades.

— After that exhibition, I became the first Swede to receive an invitation to the Salone Satellite in Milan, says Alexander, leafing through Svensk Form number 4/1998 where the exhibition is described.

Two years later, Alexander surprised again. Now with the glowing door handle Brighthandle, which premiered in Milan in 2001.

— I wanted to show something that stood out.

And succeeded. The exhibition brought 1,000 contacts in 43 countries wanting to buy the handle. And the idea for the handle itself? Well, I got that when I saw the Do Not Disturb / Please Make Up Room signs in a hotel and felt that function ought to be made clear in a significantly better way. And after a while, the penny dropped...

And that was that. Brighthandle has now been further developed and given a new design. Instead of fiber optics, the handle is now illuminated by LEDs and can alternate between green and red light for vacant and occupied, respectively. For example.

The technology is now also found in the glowing door leaf included in the current exhibition. Eight such red/green glowing restroom doors have incidentally been installed in the new nightclub Push in Gothenburg, which Alexander Lervik designed and illuminated with the help of Stockholm Lighting Company.

Lighting, a third leg to stand on Today, Alexander Lervik divides his time between product development of everything from notebooks to hotel trays and candlesticks, to furniture design for Skandiform and Johansson Design among others—six new models will be launched this spring—to interior design for retail stores such as the shoe chain Rizzo and nightclubs such as Sturekompaniet in Stockholm and Flustret in Uppsala. He is now broadening that scope further by also adding lighting as something of a third leg in his operations. Admittedly, he has in various contexts utilized light and illumination in his interior projects and also in products such as Brighthandle and now also Brightdoor, as well as in Ljusträdet/Lighttree, which was once developed as a symbol for a lecture series and was just acquired by Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo.

THE EXHIBITION ENLIGHTENMENT

But with the exhibition Enlightenment, which runs at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg through January, he takes the full step into the lighting world by presenting 17 lamps and light fixtures here, several of which are the result of lighting experiments as playful as they are imaginative, but all sharing the fact that they communicate light and blur the boundaries between light and lighting.

— With the exhibition, I want to show where I stand and hopefully strengthen my brand. I really want to get going more on the lamp side. The goal is to design a fixture series and develop a complete concept. Gladly for a large company, though on the condition that I get to take part in the change process. That would be very exciting.

Of the fixtures Alexander Lervik has developed so far, some have been put into production, while others are in the pipeline. This applies, among others, to the twisted pendant fixture Twist, the ceiling lamp DNA, the LED-clad lampshade Rainbow, and Lightswing Sense. And of course Brighthandle, which is currently mass-produced by Assa.

FACE 2007. A 3D-generated face sculpted by the designer's mother, built into a wall. With LEDs placed behind the face slowly alternating between cool and warm white light, a vivid feeling is created of, as Lervik himself puts it, the face emerging from the wall.

LED LIGHT BULB 2007. A completely ordinary light bulb with an E27 socket, but where built-in LED light illuminates the small sculpture inside the bulb.

BRIGHTDOOR 2007 A plastic surface with a specially developed louvre spreads the light evenly across the entire door surface. The light changes when you lock or unlock. Red/green for restroom doors, for example. Handle with light points.

BRIGHTHANDLE 2000 The glowing door handle premiered at the furniture fair in Milan in 2001, then with fiber-optic lighting that today has been replaced by LEDs.

— We have also discussed producing 100 copies of My Brain. However, this is so intricate in terms of pattern that it cannot be cast, but must be produced via 3D printing. So we'll see what we do here.

What, then, does Alexander Lervik know about light and lighting? Well, he has no formal training, but says he is educated by working with lighting:

— I know so much today about light levels and beam angles and other important factors that I can create a fixture that provides good light. But when specialized expertise is needed to achieve the ultimate light, well, then I call in Rikard Ahlstrand at Stockholm Lighting Company or other skilled people at, for example, Flux or Optolux.

And Alexander Lervik certainly has role models when it comes to fixture design:

— When you realize how well thought-out Poul Henningsen's PH lamps are, you cannot help but be impressed. Furthermore, I find Achille Castiglioni's various lamps incredibly exciting!

It remains to be seen whether this exhibition, like the first one, will also live on for many years and attract a million visitors.

— Time will tell, as one visitor wittily put it at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, where the exhibition Enlightenment runs through the month of January before moving over to the Stockholm Furniture Fair and Northern Light Fair in Älvsjö on February 6–10.

MY BRAIN 2007. Alexander Lervik's own brain as a table lamp. After a CT scan, all external elements were stripped away in the computer. The brain was then processed in a 3D printer. The surface...

English translation of the original article. Text read from the scanned original; small transcription errors may occur.