Here is a lamp. And here is a question we have been turning over in our hands for some time.
The lamp is seventy years old, and it has spent most of its life on someone else’s desk, doing the quiet work that good lamps do. It was passed from a father to a son, and it carries the scratches and marks of something that’s been loved for a long time. It is identical to the model once owned by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, but that is not really what makes it special.
What makes it special is that it is Lauz’s 500th rewire.
And that it is looking for a new home, though not in the way you might expect. Not as a possession. As a responsibility.
We have been thinking about how to do this for a while now. How do you pass on something that has already been passed on once, in a way that honours where it has come from and respects where it might go next? In the end, the answer came down to a single question.
Why should you be entrusted with its next chapter?
In Copenhagen this June, during 3 Days of Design, we will set the lamp on a desk. Next to it, an old Olivetti Lettera 35 typewriter, with a ream of A4 paper and a pot of Document clips. Above on the the wall, a series of wires for hanging the paper, like clothes hanging on the line, drying the ink. A small gallery growing as the days go on. And the question, sitting quietly under the light, waiting for whoever sits down beneath it.
Sit down and think for a minute. Type your sentence on the Olivetti, pin it to the wire, and read what others have written before you. Add your details to the back of the paper, so we can find you again when the time is right.
We are not selling the lamp or auctioning it. We are looking for its next custodian, and that is a different thing altogether.
Because you can’t really own anything. You can only borrow things for a moment in time. The job is to look after them while they are with you, and to pass them on in better shape than you found them. That is what a father did with this lamp and we hope that the next person will do too, when their own time with it is done.
After Copenhagen, we will open the question up to anyone who wants to answer it. If you cannot be in the room with us, you can write your sentence from wherever you are in the world, and we will type it out for you and keep adding to the wire. Then, at a time of our choosing when we get home, we will pick the words that feel like the right next home.
There is no right answer here, we are looking for something that is emotionally charged and makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand out.
It might be a sentence about something you have already mended. Or about the kind of light you read by in the evenings. We are interested in the people who think about objects this way.
No product should be designed or destined for landfill and this lamp wasn’t. Seventy years in, with Lauz’s hands on it, it still has plenty of life left, and the question now is who gets to share the next chapter.
So, here it is again, in case you missed it.
Why should you be entrusted with its next chapter?
Come to Copenhagen. Sit down. Type.
Love, Simon (and Lauz, whose hands made this possible)
