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Lampadaires En Bamboo
By : Josiah Kinney
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 17th edition
Discipline : Product
Categories : Product Design in Small Series & Hand-Made / Lighting fixture in small series or hand-made : Platinum Winner
The landscape of the Southern United States is a charming wasteland.
A Southern gothic – this wasteland of warm, humid sunbelt provides a hospitable welcome to invasive species of plants that bloom beautifully and then choke the light and available nutrients from the region. Kudzu, bamboo, bradford pear, english ivy, wisteria, etc are transforming the region into something unrecognizable from itself. Evolution’s politeness formed from millions of years of shifting continental plates and barrier oceans has been daggered by globalization and its brightly colored shipping containers that brought incompatible systems together.
If you try to keep an image of what this region is meant to look like – you lose the game quickly. There is no such thing as “local” any longer, there is no “natural” to return to.
But enough with the despair – if this sounds miserable it is because you haven’t broken the law yet. Break the law. You are an ecologist now.
It is better to adapt, to adjust these novel materials, plants, animals into a cycle with our balances. These plants exist as a crime, but if we can make these materials beautiful we can make them be seen. If we can make them useful, we can integrate them into our cultural approaches to design. Bamboo construction in North America feels phony and cheap, better suited to the beachside tiki bar than anything Professional, but we challenge that. To stop an invasion, you just need to rebrand it.
The goal of Lampadaires en bambou was to create an easily accessible and reproducible design using a locally invasive plant. The streetlamps thus took on a low-budget design that could be financed with the same economic resources as the cost of entry to the competition itself, in what was affectionately called, “Le Prix des fauchés”. Streetlamps were an easy typology to select because they were similar enough to bamboo’s natural structure, ability to cantilever, and resist wind. This isn’t biomimicry, but actual utilization of a giant grass species to create a durable and whimsical piece of lighting and at the same time making a statement against turning a blind eye on invasive plant species in this region.
All materials were locally harvested, taken most likely illegally, and most likely in the middle of night from properties with improper stewardship. The project was constructed casually over two months and with minimal resources. Although there aren’t numerical values to support the claim of being an environmental product – the project creates a positive environmental impact from the local harvest and checking of invasive ecologies.
All that being said, we believe this project would still have been a failure if it hadn’t captured one quality: a sense of whimsy. The feeling of chasing fireflies on a summer night or looking up into a tree canopy and feeling small. As intangible as this is – it is central to the project’s design philosophy; ultimately being ecological is having more fun than everyone else.
