It was the early 19th-century architect and designer Augustus Pugin who called for an honest approach to material and construction in these respective fields: one that champions maintaining the imprint of assembly as a visible, even ornamental detail, and refutes additional inauthentic layering. In today’s world, general expectation demands that new products be fully polished and formally crystalline. It is rare to find objects that “honestly” wear evidence of their making.
With the new SEAM sconce collection, Australian boutique lighting brand Articolo has returned to this principle. Launched at its NoMad, Manhattan showroom, the new offering celebrates the imperfection of assembly as ornamentation.
The linear steel and brass luminaires carry the rough welds of their seamless assembly as a central flourish, either as an additional three-dimensional feature or as a sanded-down, squiggly-line, multi-tone motif. These integral interventions juxtapose the planar surfaces they connect and the rectilinear, architectonic cutaways filtering out diffused light. The especially tall and slender fixtures take on monumental proportions.
These two metals are chemically opposed, and their seamless fusing normally poses a significant technical challenge. Differences in melting points, thermal expansion, and zinc vaporization in brass can lead to instability and inconsistency. By allowing this coherence to remain messy, Articolo’s design team was able to develop a fresh solution. The proposition is very much the result of the brand and its fabricator partnering with equal say.
“The SEAM Collection is highly complex in its simplicity and reflects many iterations to achieve these works of art,” says Nicci Kavals, founder and principal. “The artisans we work with are highly skilled in their craft and are accustomed to us pushing materials beyond their perceived limits. Everything we do challenges our engineering, our materials, and what we are asking of our makers.”
To see this and other pieces by the brand, visit articolostudios.com.
Photography courtesy of Articolo Studios.
