Golden Gate

The Missing Link

Georg Alexander Eisenhut -

Gio Design 8/1994

The starting point for the development of hanging lamp GOLDEN GATE was the call and the wish of an extendible desk lamp, that fulfils a satisfying lightning of long tables. These tables are booming in Europe since the early Nineties, coming from the tradition of Italian family tables and from Shaker, American furniture with a tradition of almost 200 years.

An interesting side aspect was the marketing of American History, that does not have anything to do with the Wild-West and the wish or desire for the big family or kin, which is nowadays dramatically and systematically endangered. The decay of privacy and private space, that became a more and more crucial reality of everyday life, just allowed the wish for such tables to be realised in extension-tables. The problems of illumination are obvious, if more than a general lighting of rooms was required.

Second point was a vacancy in my Great American Line. Till now the wall lamps POINT LOBOS and the light-concept MARINA MARRIO were its supporting pillars. The subject and the philosophical foundation of this line are the will of going west, the feeling of metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism, inter-culture, new components for an aesthetic grammar, the conversion of creative work and micro-architecture into other disciplines like mathematics, biology, aircraft construction but also gastronomy.

GOLDEN GATE symbolises so to say the European imaginable end-point of western creation and reminds us at the same time, that west of the bridge lies our Far East. GOLDEN GATE is the missing link between the occidental urge for the west and the eastwards aiming of the great Asian communities. During the last construction phase of the bridge in the year 1937 the choice of its colour was given to the citizens of San Francisco. Not by chance an industrial red, that let the bridge appear golden in the light of a certain time of day, was selected. Every viewer has his own theory about the specific colour of the GOLDEN GATE. This aspect opened an immense space of experimentation during the development of the lamp till the ideal orange was found. It was not about to copy the hue of the GOLDEN GATE in San Francisco, which would have been very easy, but to choose a colour, that enlightens - even in artificially illuminated spaces - in the viewer the light, he was always longing for.

The slightly up swinging ends of the lamp call to mind, that the same colour, often in combination with gold and marine green, can be found in Japanese temples, evoking a similar language.

The folding mechanism is constructed by means of tension springs, that keeps the sidewings in both positions in horizontal order. The reflectors are arranged in a way, that all the 6 light-sources have a free upwards and downwards emission in both positions, leaving the user undazzled and are illuminating the lamps itself.

The GOLDEN GATE lamp was first presented at the Frankfurt Autumn-Fair 1994 and is available only in this colour.