Electrifying Design: A Century of Lighting is the first comprehensive history of lighting design across the 20th and 21st centuries, tracing how the discipline shaped modern aesthetics and drove technological innovation in equal measure.
About This Book
Lighting design sits at an unusual intersection of engineering, sculpture, and environmental psychology — yet it has rarely received the sustained critical attention it deserves. This volume corrects that oversight, mapping a century of luminous invention through thematic essays that move across typologies, the quality of light itself, and the evolution of the bulb as a design object. Works by pivotal figures including Poul Henningsen, Ingo Maurer, and Gino Sarfatti anchor a broader argument: that lighting has been not merely responsive to modern design movements, but generative of them. Essential reading for designers, historians, and collectors serious about the designed environment.
Key Features
- 220 pages of thematic essays, historical timeline, and over 130 illustrations spanning functional and experimental lighting design
- Essays by Sarah Schleuning and Cindi Strauss, with comprehensive artist biographies
- Notable figures examined include Poul Henningsen, Ingo Maurer, and Gino Sarfatti
- Published by Yale University Press
What You'll Discover
- How lighting design evolved as a distinct creative discipline across different time periods and geographic contexts
- The typological diversity of lighting — from rigorously functional fixtures to fantastical sculptural objects — and what that range reveals about design culture
- The bulb as a site of ongoing formal and technological reinvention, traced through its development across the 20th and 21st centuries
- How quality of light — not just the luminaire itself — became a central concern for designers and a driver of aesthetic innovation
About the Author
Sarah Schleuning and Cindi Strauss are the editors and primary essayists of this volume. Both contribute scholarly perspectives that situate lighting design within the broader history of modern and contemporary design, drawing on significant figures and collections across international contexts.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 220
- Dimensions: 285 x 247 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780300254570
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Industrial and product designers, interior designers, design historians, and collectors with a serious interest in the material and conceptual history of the designed environment.