Yabu Pushelberg Collaborates with Louis Poulsen on Reframe

In collaboration with Louis Poulsen, multidisciplinary studio Yabu Pushelberg’s new Reframe pendant draws from Danish architect and designer Poul Henningsen’s pioneering use of layered shades to diffuse and reflect light. However, the piece, available exclusively through DWR, centers an open void where one would expect a central light source. Illumination originates from a custom LED ring tucked within a shade that curves in upon itself. The functional geometry lends Reframe an organic character, recalling both the iris and pupil of an eye and the radiating lamellae beneath a mushroom cap.

“The genius minds and enthusiasm of George and Glenn are so inspiring. They have created a unique, contemporary lamp reframing Louis Poulsen’s design philosophy, ‘Design to Shape Light,’” Monique Faber, the Chief Design Officer at Louis Poulsen, tells Surface. “As it was for the founder of our design philosophy, Poul Henningsen, more than a hundred years ago, the well-being of the user is fundamental for Yabu Pushelberg. They too wanted to design a lamp that brings comfort, where the shape and curvature of the shades are determined by the preferred quality and angle of the light.”

Suspended from slender wires, the fixture appears to hover in space, distilling Henningsen’s century-old investigation of light into a deceptively simple contemporary form that casts a soft glow through reflection and diffusion. “George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg have reframed our values of glare-free reflected light and soft transitions between light and shadow beautifully in line with our classics,” Faber says.

For Pushelberg, Reframe grew out of the idea of absence. “Most lamps begin with a source and build outward, but Reframe began with the opposite condition,” he tells Surface. “What happens when the thing that normally defines a lamp, the bulb at its center, disappears?” When Pushelberg and Yabu shifted the light source from a bulb to a ring the design took shape around the empty space.

“The shades curl inward, the ribs radiate around it, and the light appears without a definitive central source,” Yabu adds. “When suspended, the thin wires almost disappear and the whole piece feels weightless. A lamp doesn’t need to dominate a room to completely change how that space feels.”