Mark Havens

Whisp

My design is inspired by Massimo Vignelli’s stated love of ambiguity and hatred of happenstance. I believe this distinction was central to Vignelli’s visual language throughout his career.

The form of the lamp echoes two important projects found early and late in Vignelli’s career: the “A Fasce Verticali Pitcher” from 1952 and the “Heller Vignelli Chair” from 2006. Both designs almost wholly conform to established norms of form and function, yet Vignelli imbued each with the unexpected and evocative via a single clarified feature. The pitcher has an organic top edge that cascades outward from the overall volume, at once forming a spout and an analogue to the natural motion of water itself. Similarly, the gentle outward bend of the top edges of the chair does much the same thing, beckoning the viewer like an opening flower to the embrace of the seat itself.

These two gestures, at once subtle and powerful, not only transform the objects they are a part of but represent opposite ends of a connective thread that runs through Vignelli’s work across the decades.

My design is a tribute to this alchemic aspect of Vignelli’s approach, in which objects demand more than one interpretation yet in all modalities possess an unmistakable purposefulness on the part of the creator.