Skygarden Hanging Lamp

Skygarden, by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders, is a large hanging lamp that creates an intimate suspended environment, bringing the ceiling down closer to the viewers below. Wanders drew inspiration for the design from an old plaster ceiling with molded floral decoration in his former home. “I called [the ceiling] my Skygarden. . . . It didn’t need water or sun, but would live only on the warm rays of the electrical light.”[1]
The lamp is a large white dome, the interior of which is lined with a plaster hemisphere with relief decoration of delicate foliate and floral swags bathed in light from a central source. Standing under the bright niche-like dome with its floral imagery, one can delight in its lyrical and decorative qualities. It is a clever contemporary reference to a decorative ceiling motif popular in earlier decorative arts.
Skygarden relates directly to 18th- and 19th-century carved panels and molded plasterwork in the museum’s collection, and adds to the museum’s growing holdings of contemporary Dutch design. The lamp would join other works in the collection by Wanders, including his Hexagon wallpaper and his braided-rope Knotted Chair, which he created as a member of the Dutch design collective, Droog.

Skygarden Hanging Lamp; Manufactured by Flos (Italy); Italy; aluminum, plaster, halogen light source; H x diam.: 45 x 90 cm (17 11/16 x 35 7/16 in.); Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund; 2011-27-1