Why Lighting Designers Are Obsessed With Eclipses

Every 18 months on average, the moon glides across the daytime sky and cloaks the sun for a brief moment. Something curious happens in those few seconds to minutes. Temperatures drop. Crickets start chirping. The sky darkens.

By definition, a total solar eclipse, like the one that will cross over parts of North America on April 8, suggests a brief absence of light. (The celestial events occur when the moon orients itself between Earth and the sun, temporarily shielding the latter’s surface.) Because darkness is the perfect foil for light, this paradox has made solar eclipses a longstanding muse for artists, photographers, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, lighting designers. 

Over the past century, our ancient human fascination with solar eclipses has crept into our homes as lighting designers around the world have found inspiration in the moon’s shadow. Italian architect and industrial designer Vico Magistretti’s 1965 Eclisse lamp for Artemide, for example, won the prestigious Compasso d’Oro award and is part of the permanent collection at New York’s MoMA, as is the Eclipse lamp by Brazilian designer Mauricio Klabin, designed in 1982 and produced by Objekto. While examples of eclipse-inspired lighting date back to the 1920s and earlier, more recent 21st-century iterations include the Eclipse Ellipse LED wall lamp by Ingo Maurer, Japanese designer Yuichiro Morimoto’s electricity-free lamp, Nisshoku (Japanese for "eclipse"), Korean furniture designer Choi Joon Woo’s adjustable Giwa eclipse light, and a slew of mass-produced designs, the Varmblixt LED wall lamp from Ikea among them.

For someone whose job is to obsess over light, an eclipse is the end-all, be-all. "I always loved the light and how it is represented in the universe," says lighting designer Juan Orts, founder of Spanish studio MYO. "The eclipse, for me, is like the end and beginning of new life." In 2020, Orts designed an eclipse-inspired lighting collection that includes a wall-mounted lamp made up of a central disc that emits light, and two external discs that either diffuse or reflect it. Magnets peppered throughout the central disc let you snap the external ones anywhere on its surface, allowing you to choose how much light you want in your space. This feature means you can—at a scale that can only be described as microscopic compared to the cosmic proportions of our solar system—recreate various stages of an eclipse in your living room.

Motion, unsurprisingly, is a recurring theme in many eclipse-inspired lighting designs. Magistretti’s Eclisse lamp, for example, lets you spin a semispherical globe around a light bulb, effectively controlling the amount of light that comes out of it. When the half globe faces inward, a ring of light forms within the thin gap between the globe and its outer shell. Klabin’s lamp works in a similar way: It is made of a single strip of plastic rolled up in a spiral that, when unfolded, looks like a ribbed nautilus shell stretched over a light bulb. You can manipulate its form to control the amount of light emitted. Objekto cofounder Guillaume Leman says the popularity of Klabin’s Eclipse lamp keeps growing: "It is something we have been working with for more than twenty years and the figures are rising year after year."

Interestingly, solar eclipses were considered terrifying phenomena for much of history until scientific knowledge quashed existing folklore around the astronomical spectacles. But the sun itself has not only been worshipped across various cultures, its cyclical movement has also structured our lives, as humans have relied on its rising and setting to regulate our activities and mark the passage of time. When a solar eclipse interrupts that routine, it does it so rarely, and so dramatically, that we feel compelled to look up in awe. 

"The sun itself was the first source of light for man," says designer Grzegorz Hasik, who runs the Warsaw design studio Hasik with Tomasz Krzyzanowski. Hasik’s Aurora lamp is made from circular and rectangular brushed-aluminum panels that slot together with an oversize disc that holds a light bulb in its center. Because of the lamp’s geometry, the light that comes out of it resembles a halo—or the soft ring of an annular eclipse. Though the Aurora lamp wasn’t inspired by one solar eclipse in particular, the designers still remember the 1996 partial eclipse that occurred in Poland when they were both kids. "Such moments are magical," says Hasik. "They last for a short time and you feel this amazing moment strongly."

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Top photo of the Eclisse lamp by Vico Magistretti courtesy Artemide

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