Getting Heavy With Light
Christian Flindt’s interest in illumination have included installing light into chairs to investigating the properties and applications of LED, all the way to designing award-winning lighting for Louis Poulsen
Danish designer Mr. Christian Flindt’s deep interest in illumination have so far included installing light into chairs to investigating the properties and applications of LED, all the way to designing award-winning lighting for Louis Poulsen
Mr. Christian Flindt first built his name and eponymous label designing art-driven objects, the type that ended up in galleries, and eventually in the hands of collectors. (His Orchid Chair is among the most collected pieces of furniture in the world.) He did this without letup since launching his design company in 2003, a year after he completed his studies at Aarhus School of Architecture, until he saw himself burning out. “I had to take a rest; there wasn’t much choice – I just couldn’t do anything else,” he recalls.
By 2012, he had headlined exhibitions and entered in competitions, including one for furniture design for the UN Headquarter in New York City. By then his massive of body works have earned for him a substantial work grant from the Danish government, through the States Art Foundation Kunstfonds, tiding him over for three years while he recovered. His spirits and energies restored, Mr. Flindt returned to work and began focusing on royalty design, particularly lighting, an area where he has honed both interest and expertise. “If you see most of my furniture, you will see that lighting is an integral part of their design.” Among his prime outputs were the Light Lounger and the Lightbox Chair.
Today, Mr. Flindt is well known for designer lighting, some of which are the result of highly successful collaborations with Danish lighting brand Louis Poulsen, with whom he began working in 2006. “The first time I designed furniture with light was actually for Louis Poulsen,” he relates. “They asked about 20 of us to design for an exhibition in Frankfurt where they were participating. LED had just come out and was being shown in trade exhibitions, and they wanted us to have a look at the then new technology.” In the end, Mr. Flindt was one of two who were selected to join Louis Poulsen in the said exhibition. His design, a huge cushion that incorporated LED, showed the unique character and distinct advantages of the technology as a source of light.
The 46-year-old designer continues to explore the many possibilities of LED technology. He has won the Knud Engelhardts Memorial Scholarship in 2013, and obtained funding from a Danish Department of Energy and Electricity a year later to work on a project involving asymmetrical lighting with LED. The project dispelled unconfirmed claims that LED caused vision problems.
Mr. Flindt got paid for conducting the research and as well as for designing at the conclusion of the project. “It is not one of those research projects that eventually ended up in a bin,” he points out, “an output – product – is expected to come out of it.” Many other projects are lined up for the Danish designer, including one that looks into the effects of lighting and acoustics in offices. He intends to apply the findings from the research to products of his own design.
Mr. Flindt finds his current situation ideal; he has both the freedom to investigate areas that interest him and create based on the knowledge obtained from such investigations. Even though he designs for other brands, he is not handed a list of things to do. “I decide what I think is important, what I need, and whom I would like to work with to approach a design. It is more collaborative, no longer based on a client brief that I get and work in isolation for a month and a half. Now I can have valuable dialogs and creative inputs in my design projects. I am very happy.”
One of the early projects that Mr. Flindt developed for Louis Poulsen was a lens for indoor use. He was interested in inventing everything from ground up to the point that the project had become very complicated that if something went wrong the whole thing collapse. “I realized how important it was to know the company that you work for. Why are they successful? How long have they been in business? Do they have capabilities to produce in different places? It’s a sum of all these reasons – the longevity and heritage and all that.”
More importantly, he found out that a design project is an even partnership between the designer and the brand, and that the former should also push for a commitment from the latter. “You are in competition with other designers and manufacturers, and commercial success is important. I think Louis Poulsen would never start anything that they didn’t believe would become commercial successes, but I also feel that, for example, our new wall lighting, had a creative starting point because it began with a research project in which I developed this process of cutting.”
Maturity is an important factor in shaping his design vision, according to Mr. Flindt. “I generally think more about the environment and what I put out in the world. I want it to be good. I think it is also what Louis Poulsen wants.” For example, he made the Flindt Wall series very minimalistic in order to last longer as a design proposition, and also to be made of just two aluminum parts. “Hopefully, in the next 50 years or more, when they are outdated, and there’s a new technology, you can easily take them apart, take a few tools out and build it all over again.” The same forward thinking applies to his other designs for Louis Poulsen. “We had to consider other benefits, such as energy efficiency, when we designed the LP Xperi street lamp, for example. I think that is part of good design.”
Mr. Flindt has developed an extensive collection of lighting with Louis Poulsen, including the Flindt 220 floor lamp, the Flindt 220 pendant, the Flindt 475 pendant, the Flindt Bollard and the LP Grand pendant.