Boaz Cohen, co-founder of Amsterdam-based studio BCXSY, shares the development process behind the Tubelight, the practice’s playful, award-winning take on fluorescent lights. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Maile Evans.
Fluorescent lights have illuminated many a library, restaurant and workspace.
Though practical, these industrial light sources with accompanying buzz and occasional flick aren't usually synonymous with the words cozy or homely.
But the Amsterdam studio Bixi has taken the fluorescent light as its starting point for their own playful take on this lighting type.
The tube light has a minimalist design and features a flexible strip tube that can be arranged into numerous configurations and quite literally bends the rules of lighting.
It won the NYC by Design award for best architectural lighting earlier this year and is produced in collaboration collaboration with the Dutch furniture, interior and lighting design company moi.
And it's at the MOI showroom in Amsterdam that I caught up with Boas Cohen.
He's a co founder and designer at bixie.
It's there that we discussed the developments of the tube light and some of its most intriguing characteristics.
It's one of those most used at least also when you talk about quantity, like lighting types in the world for almost a century now, and it's at the same time not the most popular, to say the least.
I cannot really explain or say why, but I always liked it.
It has this industrial appeal and it's very plain and very bright.
It's very unnatural.
So some lights try to, especially when you put lampshades or something in domestic environment, like you kind of try to create this warmth and it's very unapologetic.
I always appreciated it actually, from appreciating.
It to creating your very own version or form of fluorescent lighting.
Talk me through that journey or maybe some of the challenges in arriving at the final piece that you've been showcasing today.
One of the things that influence often our work is literally how you look and see things.