Ingo Maurer GmbH, Germany 59 x 43 1/4" (149.9 x 109.9 cm) Gift of the Architecture and Design Committee in honor of Mary Bright © 2016 Ingo Maurer There are 9,457 design works online. There are 2,470 product design works online.Chandelier is both a revolt against the slickness of contemporary design and Maurer’s celebration of cinematic slow-motion explosions, like those seen in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). The production of this piece is limited to just ten a year, as the construction of each lamp requires the effort of four people. The builders break plates with a hammer or simply drop them on the floor. The pieces, broken arbitrarily, determine the arrangement of the final design. from Rough Cut: Design Takes a Sharp Edge, November 26, 2008–October 12, 2009 Licensing of MoMA images and videos is handled by Art Resource (North America) and Scala Archives (all other geographic locations). All requests should be addressed directly to those agencies, which supply high-resolution digital image files provided to them directly by the Museum.

This record is a work in progress. Two weeks ago upcycleDZINE showed a real upcycle design classic and I told you that I would soon show you another one. Well today I’m showing you one of my favorites and one of the most impressive upcycle design chandeliers I know. It’s a design with an aesthetic that’s really timeless and has inspired many designers with its beauty and originality. I’m talking about incredible German designer Ingo Maurer who created a chandelier called ‘Porca Miseria‘, a suspension lamp made with porcelain shards. Ingo Maurer, born in 1932, studied graphic design in Munich | 1960 Maurer left Germany for the United States, where he worked in New York and San Francisco as a freelance graphic designer. In 1963, he moved back to Germany, and founded Design M, a company that developed and manufactured lamps after his own designs. The company was later renamed to ‘Ingo Maurer GmbH‘. Ingo Maurer is one of the most innovative and influential lighting designers working today who has exhibited in many leading museums around the world.

The company has two spacious showrooms, one in New York and the other in Munich. Among his best-known designs are the winged bulb Lucellino (1992) and Porca Miseria!  I love this chandelier design for several reasons. First because it looks absolutely amazing. Second because it’s a great example of upcycle design. And the third reason is something I discovered when I searched for info about Porca Miseria! chandeliers lincoln saxilbyI’m not sure if you read about why I started upcycleDZINE and designing upcycle lamps. chandelier eglise grenobleIt all started when I was walking around the well known Salone del Mobile during the Milan design week. chandelier room slieve donardThe first time I went there I searched for great design.

And there was lots of it. At some point even to much, because I noticed that all the great designs that where out there did nothing for the environment or didn’t add anything to what was already there. Except of course a few young designers who where willing to stand out. Well after I realized this I started to focus on upcycle design and wanted to show what is all about. So when I read the story on how Ingo Maurer came to create his chandelier I could really relate to that. It was when he went to Milan once: “I found too many designs there slick and design-conscious. is partly a kind of revolt against that tendency.” The chandelier was first called ‘Zabriskie Point‘ after a film by Antonioni where a castle was blown up in slow motion. “But then the first few Italians came, and — since no one had seen this ever before — said, ‘Porca miseria!’ which is a kind of a cuss: “What bad luck!” So I immediately changed the name to Porca Miseria!.” Ingo Maurer GmbH produces the chandelier in a limited number.

They do only 10 a year. It takes four people almost five days to create one. Porcelain plates are bought at a regular shop. “First, we smash them: I have one, I drop it; or I take a hammer to it. It looks very much at random — and it is, maybe 50 or 60 percent. The rest is in a way constructed: There’s a bit of calculation of how big I want to have the piece I want to use.” Photos © Ingo Maurer GmbH Just like TOUR, the design isn’t created out of waste. But they both point out to look at objects in a different way. In a way that a certain object could get a new life, different function. And by doing so ideas get triggered to transform waste and old stuff into new design pieces. I really hope, like I do with all other designs here on upcycleDZINE, that it will inspire you to take a second look at waste. Design by Ingo MaurerMerisi's post yesterday, over at Vienna for Beginners (go and check it out, it's a daily visual treat), on a window display of broken china in a Viennese porcelain shop, reminded me of the first time I saw this amazing chandelier at Waddesdon Manor.

German designer Ingo Maurer made this chandelier in 1994 in response to what he felt to be the slick, overly-designed look of contemporary furniture. He initially called it 'Zabriskie Point', after the slow-motion explosion in Antonioni's film, but when some Italians came to its first showing and muttered "porca miseria!" in amazement, he changed the name. Among today's successful designers, Ingo Maurer is a rarity: he tells the truth. His lighting designs, whether lamps for production or one-of-a-kind installations, are widely acclaimed, yet they are not slick, nor are they conventionally pretty. Some of them even seem a bit awkward at first. But that's because they're fundamentally about one thing: casting light on human feeling. When the 70-year-old Maurer -- who is based in Munich but whose only retail store is located in SoHo -- was describing a piece he designed in 1997 for a Spanish bank, his inspiration was telling. ''Paragaudi,'' a long, rippling, illuminated ribbon of gold-plated aluminum, is a homage to Antonio Gaudí, the great Catalan architect.

''He was not cool,'' Maurer notes admiringly. ''His architecture was very emotional.''And it is precisely that ''uncool'' quality of emotion, backed by technological sophistication (but never the other way around), that makes Maurer's designs so compelling. He's still a hippie at heart -- he's a big fan of the Burning Man festival -- and people love him for it. Maurer's new designs, shown during the Cologne and Milan furniture fairs, attract traffic-stopping crowds. His installations -- whether a field of glow sticks that look like fireflies or a firmament of candles hanging from nearly invisible wires -- elicit childlike wonder from jaded adults. For a subway station in Munich, he concealed harsh fluorescent lighting deep within giant aluminum dome shades lined in bright colors, to ''make people feel well.'' (Design aficionados can soak up these good vibes at a major Maurer retrospective currently at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. And until Feb. 23, two Maurer installations -- one of which features his exploding-crockery chandelier, ''Porca Miseria!''

(an Italian profanity), hung in an 18th-century French paneled room -- can be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art).Maurer's conceptual approach has been just as beneficial to his lighting fixtures as it has to his installation pieces. In 1984, inspired by the sight of little lights on wires that stretched across a piazza, Maurer came up with ''YaYaHo,'' a revolutionary system of low-voltage halogen lights with shades and mirrors, which can be mounted interchangeably on slender conductive cables. It looks both high-tech and circus-whimsical, and has been so widely imitated that it's safe to say most people have no idea where it comes from. Even something as sweet as his 1992 lamp, ''Lucellino,'' a winged light bulb soaring on two thin wires, features an innovative, touch-sensitive dimmer that was developed for his company by Hermann Kovacs.In 1997, Maurer presented one of his most enchanting designs, ''Wo bist Du, Edison, . . .?'' (''Where Are You, Edison?''), the result of two decades' work.

Its acrylic shade has a hologram of a light bulb that takes 2,000 individual photographs to produce and that accounts in part for the light's $5,555 price tag. And the shade is suspended from a socket whose form mimics Thomas Edison's profile -- a tribute to the man whose invention became something of an obsession with Maurer. Although he was trained as a typographer and spent a few years in the 1960's doing graphic design in San Francisco (''I breathe better here,'' he says fondly of the United States), Maurer's eureka moment came on a rainy day in a Venetian pensione, where he was lying in bed, staring up at a dim light bulb. ''I fell in love with it,'' he recalls. ''I had to do something with it.'' So in 1966 Maurer took a standard Edison bulb, encased it in a bigger, handblown crystal bulb and called it ''Bulb,'' which instantly began his career. ''He's as fascinated with the burning light bulb as he is by the light it casts,'' says Murray Moss, a co-owner of Moss, arguably the pre-eminent design store in the United States.

''The magic of a current running through a filament is still what it's about for him.'' It is ''the allegorical nature'' of Maurer's designs, Moss says, that ''makes them appear poetical, not cold, technical sources of light.'' Even Maurer's recent work with L.E.D.'s -- which are costly but last at least 50 times longer than conventional bulbs -takes them out of the realm of the laboratory and into that of the senses. For the opening last year of Chanel's fine-jewelry boutiques in New York, Paris and Seoul, Maurer set miniature, Day-Glo-colored mountains (with diamond ''treasures'' placed inside) among floors and benches that sparkled with L.E.D.'s.Maurer's work is also his art, and he hates to compromise, so he manufactures his own designs. Maurer's team of 70, headquartered in a collection of little buildings in one of Munich's more bohemian neighborhoods, includes his wife, Jenny Lau, who runs the administrative side of the business, as well as designers and technicians. What it does not include is a marketing department.