LAMPS AND LIGHTING 
THE MODERN MOVEMENT IN THE USA
When Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled the Nazis and arrived in the USA in the 1930s, they were able to stamp their brand of European Modernism on the prevailing Machine Age aesthetic movement which had been gathering momentum since the early 1920s. 
But the pure design preoccupations of the Bauhaus were at odds with a more commercial school of design founded in the dark days after the 1929 Wall Street Crash by a pioneer group of American design consultants led by Raymond Loewy, Walter Darwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes. They believed in using streamlining and other styling motifs to appeal to mass markets. Design was a business tool to be exploited, rather than a social and moral instrument for change as Gropius argued.
Light fittings by Walter Darwin Teague and his contemporary Donald Deskey, designer of the Art Deco Radio City Music Hall interior in New York, show this American preoccupation with 'styling‘. Many industrial designers of the 1930s and 40s were known as stylists. But the USA's most popular and widely used desk light from the early 1950s onwards had very different antecedents.
In the early 1930s George Carwardine, a young English designer created a desk light based on the constant-tension principles of the human arm. The concept shared in its basis in nature and function a link with both Art Nouveau and the Bauhaus. The result was the famous Anglepoise Light which remains in production, scarcely altered, to this day. In 1937 Jac Jacobsen, a Norwegian, saw the Anglepoise, bought the patent and renamed the light Luxo. After enormous success in Scandinavia, he took Luxo to the USA in 1951, where it became, and remains, a common sight in homes, offices and factories everywhere.

POST WAR RECONSTRUCTION________________________________________
Although Britain and the USA saw the invention of the light bulb, and Scandinavia contributed many classic light fittings, attention began to switch elsewhere after World War Two. 
In Japan in 1951, the mayor of a small town known for making paper lanterns asked the artist and designer Isamu Noguchi to do something to revive the town's sagging economy. The result was the collapsible paper lampshade, popular around the world today, which diffuses light through its globe shape. But it was in Italy that the idea of the light fitting as industrial sculpture and 'social metaphor' took hold. After 1945, as Italy struggled to build a new Identity in the ruins of Fascism, the ricostruzione, as it is known, placed industrial design at the heart of economic and social regeneration. The Italians expressed their sense of a new beginning with the most vigorous outpouring of modern design. Domestic products such as furniture, table ware and lighting -low-technology objects which could be rendered unique with a high degree of imagination and style - become the medium by which Italians would signal their new position in world trade.

ITALIAN DESIGN LEADS THE WORLD________________________________________
During the 1950s a wide range of novel Italian light fittings become available. Some designs were whimsical, others exaggerated pre-war styles. But Italian lighting firms began to emerge as a major international force. Arteluce, the company founded by the gifted Gino Sarfatti in 1939 and later sold to Flos, won the prestigious Italian Compasso d'Oro industrial design prize in 1955 and 1956. 
In 1959 a young missile engineer, Ernesto Gismondi, founded the Artemide lighting company in Milan. Two years later he commissioned a young architect called Vico Magistretti, who had no experience of designing lights. A totally new and exciting era in lighting design was beginning. Italian light-fitting design would go on to lead the world (or the next 30 years or more).
The bridge between the 1950s and 1960s was built by the Castiglioni brothers, Achille and Pier Giacomo, who put a car head lamp on the end of a fishing rod and pointed it upwards. The result was the Neo-Functionalist Toio Lamp for Flos in 1962.

The Toio Lamp marked a bridge in more ways than one. It signalled the collision of two aesthetics which had run in parallel throughout the century but had rarely met. On one track was domestic lighting, designed to suit the needs of decorated interiors and dating back to the Art Nouveau of Galle and Tiffany. On the other were rugged, utilitarian fittings, forged in the spirit of Behrens and designed for use in factories and mines, where the need for efficient lighting was greater.
The process of taking lighting innovations directly from offices and factories into the home accelerated. It had started with fluorescent strip lighting and was set to continue in the 1970s and 1980s with spotlight track, uplighters and low voltage systems.
The Toio Lamp was also the forerunner to the 'salvage' school of design pioneered in Europe in the 1980s by the London-based designer Ran Arad, in which lighting and furniture would be created from metal and found objects.

THE INTRODUCTION OF PLASTICS_______________________________________
The 1960s saw a period of great creative ferment as new visual ideas and technologies were tested. Materials technology in particular had a profound effect on design. Glass designs had dominated lamp manufacture in the Art Nouveau period, and metalworking was the preferred option in the time of Behrens and the Bauhaus. Right up to the 1960s glass and metal, especially spun steel, were the almost inevitable materials as bulbs emitted too much heat for much else. But then came the revolution in plastics.
In 1924 thiourea formaldehyde plastics, which could be mottled in any colour, were invented in Britain. Their earliest use was seen on Bandalasta lamp shades made by Brookes and Adams in the 1920s. But it was not until the 1960s that plastics came into their own in light fittings, with the widespread use of acrylic, variously known as Plexiglass, Perspex or Lucite. This had been invented in Britain by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1933, and developed during World War Two. Now it was made commercially available in transparent, translucent and opaque forms. The Italians seized the initiative in lighting; Milan became a Mecca (or international designers, and, in 1971, the German Richard Sapper combined Teutonic precision with Italian sensuality to create the classic Tizio Light for Artemide.

THE MEMPHIS GROUP_______________________________________
During the 1970s the light fitting was the symbol o Italian design, emblazoning its style, founded on sophistication and good taste, around the world. But the rules were about to avant-garde groups as Studio Alchimia and a revolution in design was brewing. In 1981 the architect and designer Ettore Sottsass launched the first Memphis collection of lights, vases and furniture at the Milan Furniture Fair. The effect was shattering, Memphis had turned its back on Milanese good taste in general and sculptural sophistication in lighting in particular. Instead it gloried in gaudy parody - of 1950s Italian cappuccino bars, of Egyptology and rock'n'roll.
Fantastic, irrational shapes were employed; lights were combined with other pieces of furniture; clashing colour shocked the eyes. The stranglehold of twentieth-century Modernism was broken as Memphis ushered in the colourful and chaotic era of Post-Modernist design.
The effects of Memphis were felt throughout international design, but by the mid-1980s its influence was on the wane and there was a classical, revivalist backlash. Many designs from the early years of the century were revived, and some high performance modern fittings resembled Art Deco lights.

INNOVATION IN THE 80s_______________________________________
The 1980s proved fascinating for more progressive reasons. It was the decade when everything finally came together: light source and materials technology advanced dramatically; an eclecticism of visual style asserted itself (due at least in part to Sottsass); and architects began to show the same fierce enthusiasm for the light fitting as industrial designers.
The result was a golden era, a decade of radical and often breathless innovation. Italy held poll position on account of the incredible output of its leading firms and the magnetic hold on buyers of Euroluce, its annual September showcase at the Milan Furniture Fair. But many of the highly acclaimed designers in the Italian hothouse came from elsewhere: Ingo Maurer from West Germany, Philippe Starck from France, Masayuki Kurokawa from Japan.
Technological innovations proved the driving force: computer controls, touch-sensitive switches and low-voltage and mini-fluorescent sources changed the rules of design. Light sources were cooler so there could be new combinations of metal, plastics, paper and wood in fittings. And smaller so wires suspending low-voltage pinpricks of light across ceilings in the work of Maurer and London-based Shiu-Kay Kan introduced a new aesthetic. New breakthroughs in structural engineering prompted parallel Innovations in the ability of light to span space; for example, the West German firm Erco commissioned two advanced light systems from the architect Roy Fleetwood.