Swedish design studio, Form Us With Love, has been awarded the Form +1 Award for the design of its Levels lamp at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, which took place last month.
The studio is accustomed to praise for its intriguing, simplistic, and yet labour-intensive, designs – and these characteristics are no better exemplified than in Levels, its latest lamp design for Swedish furniture company, One Nordic.
The collapsible Levels metal lamp is a pendant lamp, made of multiple parts. However, in the interest of One Nordic’s end-users, Form Us With Love designed the lamp to be assembled without the use of any tools.
Available in three sizes and colours, Levels stands out for its modern simplicity. Created using metal sheets that are spun and pushed around a rotating mandrel, the lamps are given a fold at the end to support the structure. This fold enables the different shades to hang from one another, cleverly allowing the parts to be stacked when transported.
Explaining the idea behind the design, a spokesperson from the Form Us With Love collective says: “We love that the design concept is built on intuition, suggesting that the receiver understand more with less.”
With packaging at less than a third of its size, the Levels lamp also fulfils the eco-friendly credentials that One Nordic pursues in as much of its operations as possible.
“One Nordic has taken up the challenge of online buying and quick assembly,” explains Joel Roos, the company’s founder. “One Nordic is based around delicate simplicity, and Levels is a result of a deep understanding of our brand. We meet and talk about integrated values and ideologies with Form Us With Love before we even begin talking about new products.
“But when Form Us With Love finds a solution, we trust them to explore the possibilities to meet our common goals. The foundation of One Nordic is built on the transformation challenge – instantly likeable, flat-packaged, competitive designs with assembly as easy as child’s play. When the lamp is in its final form, the easy dismantle is merely a hidden value behind a great design.”
Form Us With Love found the solution for the Levels lamp hidden in the process. The idea came about as the studio visited a factory in Sweden that is well-regarded for its quality metal spinning.
“At the factory, the metal sheets used for the lampshades are spun and pushed around a rotating mandrel until they reach perfect circle forms. At the very end of the spin, you give the shades a fold to support the structure,” a spokesperson from Form Us With Love explains. “The spun fold gave us the idea of making the different-sized shades hang from one another.”
The Levels lamp is offered in three different sizes and colours, each of which juxtapose the hard metal surface with softer, modern colours – white, grey and copper. Moreover, the large, rounded metal forms further accentuate the pendant, ensuring the final product stands out despite its minimalistic – yet modern – characteristics.
