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The Gras lamp has a unique place in the history of lighting. Designed and manufactured in 1921, it inaugurated a new genre of lighting system whose vocation is to satisfy both the world of industry and the booming tertiary sector.
With variable geometry and easily adaptable to suit individual needs, the Gras lamp is able to efficiently illuminate machine tools, drawing boards, offices, laboratories and even the operating theater of the Normandy ocean liner. Repudiating all ornamental mannerism, its creator, the engineer Bernard-Albin Gras, endowed it with an aesthetic based on this perfect adequacy of intent and drawing which is the basis of what we call design today.
As such, its success was immediate, to the point of sparking interpretations and imitations, particularly among members of the Bauhaus fascinated by this incunabula of modernity. But it was Le Corbusier who gave it a particular aura, seeing in it, in his own words, a “tool-object” reduced to its pure functionality, a "standard object” which benefited his agency and his architectural creations. Following him, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Eileen Gray, Michel Roux-Spitz, Sonia Delaunay, Georges Braque and many other figures of the avant-garde adopted it, helping to make it a legend. This prestigious career is coupled with a more anonymous success in the world of work, exceptional in terms of the volume of its orders and its duration. There are very few other examples of a lamp which, without major modification, has been produced for more than half a century.
After a few decades of obscurity, the Gras lamp regained notoriety among a new generation of architects, decorators and collectors, fascinated by this object of early modernity as they were by the furniture of Le Corbusier, Herbst, Prouvé and Perriand. This work traces the history of an invention and an industrial adventure but it is also intended to be a walk through the aesthetic choices of the interwar period and the more eclectic styles of the present time.
• 23 x 30.5 cm
• 400 illustrations
• 224 pages
• hardback cover
• Bilingual French-English edition
• ISBN: 978-2-29155-4244-8