ARC LAMP
Peter Behrens for AEG 1908
Designed by the influential artistic adviser to the giant German AEG industrial company. This lamp is a significant forerunner to the modern generation of undecorated, utilitarian light fittings. Peter Behrens, a founding father of the modern industrial-design profession, rejected the florid Art Nouveau styling of the period by developing a more robust functionalist aesthetic for AEG lamps. His approach paved the way for later explorations by Bauhaus teachers in Germany and by designers and architects of the international Modern Movement.

HANGING LAMP
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld 1920
This intriguing lamp, a Formalist play on structure in space, is one of the lasting monuments to the avant-garde De Stijl movement in art and architecture. Rietveld, a Dutch architect and furniture designer, brought a practical flair to an essentially theoretical movement when he joined De Stijl. He designed this early example of a lighting system, which shows the influence of Cubism on De Stijl, for his most important architectural patron Mrs Shröder; a version later hung in the office of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. The lamp uses standard bulb fittings yet its arrangement on different planes elevates this domestic object to the level of Constructivist art.

AKARI PAPER LAMPSHADE
Isamu Noguchi 1950
The standard Japanese-style paper lampshade, a popular feature in countless homes all over the world, dates back to the early 1950s, when the leading Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi was approached by the mayor of a small Japanese town renowned for producing traditional paper lanterns. Asked to develop a light capable of reviving the town's failing economy, he designed the Akari hanging lamp, a collapsible design made of mulberry-bark paper –the paper used by ancient Japanese print artists. The Akari, which means 'light as illumination' in Japanese, proved so inexpensive and attractive -it gives off a warm, diffused glow- that many Japanese manufacturers took up the same idea.

PH 5 LIGHT
Poul Henningsen for Louis Poulsen 1958
Henningsen's most famous light fitting adorns interiors all over Scandinavia today. It demonstrates the designer's subtle understanding and confident handling of light. In essence, a simple central globe has been cut and reworked into sculptural segments so that the lamp relies for illumination on reflections from a series of metal planes. Aglow is a marvellous sight -simple yet so intriguing and effective, the essence of good design.

TARAXACUM
Achille and Pier Castiglioni for Flos 1960
The central globe pendant made popular by Isamu Noguchi in Japan in the 1950s was reinterpreted by two of the most prominent and creative members of the new wave in Italian design in the 1960s. This cocoon-like version of the pendant lamp is made of a metal skeleton covered in a styrene webbing, which is then sprayed with synthetic fibres and layers of vinyl that harden to create a tough outer skin. Taraxacum gives out a soft, diffused light which is very practical. Yet it also makes its own strong visual statement. 

F R I S B I
Achille Castiglioni for Flos 1978
This landmark light fitting from Flos shows Achille Castiglioni, the most celebrated of the Castiglioni brothers, reworking the traditional hanging pendant to create fresh visual interest and new patterns of light. Its influential design sends down a narrow shaft of direct light as well as diffusing and reflecting light. A Frisbee shaped acrylic diffuser is supported by three very thin steel wires, and the reflector above is made of chromed metal. The perfect harmony of the fitting's structural elements provides an aesthetic which complements the functional ingenuity of the three-way control of light. 

AREA
Mario Bellini for Artemide 1974
An early example of a flexible lighting system in which the ceiling light is just one element in a modular range of ways to light a room, this design by Mario Bellini features a central suspension pendant on a rise-and-fall mechanism. The light's body is made of polycarbonate plastics: the diffuser, recalling in its form Paolo Venini's "crumpled handkerchief" Fazzoletti glass vase of 1954, is in a synthetic textile. There are also floor and table-lamp versions of the Area design. Its softer, more sensual approach suggested an alternative to the rectilinear emphasis of much modern design. Once again the Italians were pointing the way forward. 

YA YA HO LIGHTING
Ingo Maurer for Design M 1984
In this radical, technical and aesthetic breakthrough, the gifted West German designer Ingo Maurer made use of low-voltage halogen light sources to suspend a cable system across the ceiling in a variety of dramatic configurations. Evoking memories of a circus high-wire act, this original idea has been imitated. A transformer is incorporated into the system to convert the mains-voltage current of 220 or 125 volts to just 12 volts.