At one end of the lamp, there is flower pot that gets heat and light from the LED light inserted in the horn of the lamp. Hence, the warm luminous glow supports the photosynthesis process of the accompanying plant. It is not only innovative but also a perfect design for today's deteriorating environment. Besides being technically correct, they look beautiful and elegant as well.
We have Romolo Stanco, the very creative thinker with us for a small interview. Let's learn more about Romolo and this amazing development by him:
Romolo, please introduce yourself to E-junkies. Tell us a bit about your background.
My school education was a little odd. After getting my diploma from the Classical Lyceum – and years spent among books in Latin and Ancient Greek, swimming training and concerts around Italy with my rock band of the time – I decided to enrol at the University of Parma’s Faculty of Physics where I completed two years. But the necessity to express something of my own was always there. In the music on the albums and videos made with the band, but also in my passions. So, without too much thought I transferred to the Faculty of Architecture at Milan Polytechnic. At that time I did motorcycle racing, and it was my racing bike, a hybrid based on a Honda but totally redesigned aesthetically, that became my first "design object" to be published in international magazines.
Architecture, music, design, sport; my passions have always been a very intricate web of connections that contaminated my projects, my approach to the resolution of project problems. If I hadn’t got to know the composite materials of motorbikes, bicycles and sailing boats I might never have thought up and designed a chair like LaDinDon; if I hadn’t been totally crazy about music I might never have had that particular insight that made the "ELFO" recording studio one of the most interesting from the point of view of non-traditional acoustic solutions.
I believe that being hybrid, not coming from a standard academic background, has allowed me to explore "borderline" horizons which today represent one of my characteristics as a professional suspended between form, research, experimentation, new technologies and new ways of using objects and houses.
Firstly, let's talk about your wonderful product 'Green Lantern'. What inspired you to create it?
GreenLantern is the "manifesto" of my project approach. It was born way back in 2006 when the Val Poschiavo Museum in Switzerland asked me to redesign an object that was typical of their cultural tradition (a travelling container for wine known as a "trincheta") using shapes and technologies of our own times and wood, but interpreted through the most up-to-date production processes. Talking with my friend Stefano Besseghini, a physicist at CNR (National Research Council) who was then collaborating with the German Fraunhofer Institute the possibility came up of working with "liquid wood", this amazing biopolymer which German scientists were putting the finishing touches to in those months.
The idea of creating objects in wood that was impossible even to imagine in this material fascinated me right from the start.
The possibility of injecting wood into moulds, of modelling it like plastic (what a contradiction, eh?) to create a complex hollow object without having to work on the "piece".
Nevertheless, I wanted it to be clear that this object belonged to the natural world, which is why it contains and at the same time was born from a plant: wood belongs to the vegetable kingdom, and I wanted to start from there.
But in a certain sense I also wanted to return there, to close the circle in other words. And so the vase (seen as a plant container) becomes, in terms of form, an energy container too (a very low consumption, high yield LED lamp with a colour temperature which is ideal for plant growth) which is then transformed into light which, shining on the plant encourages its photosynthesis.
GreenLantern is an object that is typologically new because it starts from the premise of realizing something that didn’t exist in a material that didn’t exist. Designing and realizing a "classic" chair, a table with an unusual shape but a known typology wasn’t stimulating enough for us (in fact I think it was actually the wrong road!)
How did the idea of using a 'wood by-product' come to you?
I think it’s fundamental that this material is born as a by-product of a way of processing wood which is usually used by paper makers to extract cellulose. The Germans at the Fraunhofer Institute have patented a system to allow lignin (the starchy base of wood which is a by-product of paper making) to polymerize at high temperature like a normal plastic and therefore to use a "part" of a material which would otherwise end up being used as fuel. This process provides a way of lengthening the material’s lifespan.
It’s obvious that wood’s "natural end" is combustion (there’s even a special version of the GreenLAntern inspired by this concept called "The Burn Identity"), but this process gives the chance of granting a "piece" of life to a material which otherwise would end up being destroyed to become energy.
Nothing renders the idea of energy and its cycle better than artificial light.
Liquid wood is believed to be the plastic of tomorrow. What do you have to say about this?
I don’t see it like that. In the press and blogs liquid wood is often defined as the "plastic of the future", but this "substitute" approach rarely works when using new materials. The characteristics of liquid wood are not as uniform as those of plastic. Plastic of any kind is used to facilitate production, for its cheapness, and to assure standardization. Liquid wood is wood! And as a "natural" material it maintains characteristics of uniqueness with a substantial difference between every moulding, both in terms of performance and aesthetics.
I think liquid wood is "the wood of tomorrow", that is, a new way of using wood, making it possible to employ this material in situations where, because of the difficulties involved, certain uses wouldn’t even have been considered.
I’m thinking of electronics, acoustics, the car industry, jewellery.
I think the real added value of this material is not ecology just because it’s a natural material.
From the point of view of recycling, plastics have achieved great results (by now also standardized),but if we think of how much "waste" of wood could be avoided by the application of moulding methods to eliminate procedures which unsurprisingly produce useless leftovers, well, here’s how liquid wood can find a road to the future.
Please describe to us the creative work process in creating 'Green Lantern'.
GreenLantern, the table-lamp/vase in liquid wood – the first design item in the world to make exclusive use of this material has been designed and conceived by myself and developed by the spin-off company NuDe under the scientific supervision of Stefano Besseghini (MD of RSE energy system research company, head of Lecco National Research Council), and the Politec laboratories, the Innovation Pole of the Valtellina region. GreenLantern is the first design object in the world conceived, imagined, developed and made of liquid wood: It is a product that proudly celebrates the skill of companies in the Valtellina area that have never had anything to do with the world of design.
GreenLantern is a flowerpot and a lamp, intrinsically linked in an inseparable relationship. The light produced by the lamp (a strip of LED created especially for this project with very low consumption and with a warm, sensitive luminous temperature) can be considered a symbolic representation of plant life that thanks to the light is able to perform the photosynthesis it requires to live and grow. The formal sign that unifies these two concepts (giving light and containing a living organism) is clear and sharply defined; it develops in space as an incomplete circle hastily sketched that, through the energy of the light, falls on the plant and symbolically closes its geometry.
What's next? Are you going to come up with some other product that would be as innovative and eco-friendly as this one?
We’re working on various projects that I consider profoundly innovative. I believe real innovation is born nowadays only out of a crossover of different skills in which projects are inserted like the knot of a spider’s web into a fairly vast set of experience, sectors and knowledge. For this reason, the collaboration we establish in our projects is never reduced to a mere use of external consultancy, but brings different figures into the projects (which are seen as routes and not results).
Companies outside the world of design, but also experimental research laboratories and suppliers who are willing to expand their sector of operation, are perfect interlocutors for opening up avenues of research and projects that can lead to genuinely new results.
I’m convinced that a really eco-friendly approach is not necessarily that of using materials which are natural, recyclable or ecological, but means conceiving and producing objects that belong to our own times, that do not imitate the splendours of the past modifying only their shape and style, but rethink the use we make of objects in the "daily life of 2011".
Almost 12 years after 2000 we’re still anchored in production rooted in the driving forces behind a lifestyle which is no longer ours.
"Ecological" comes from the Greek: οίκος, oikos, "house" or also "environment"; and λόγος, logos, "discourse" or “study”.
This is not a "green" approach but a "study" of what happens in the home, in the environment we live in.
I think my research will be concentrated here in the immediate future.
A project we’re working on at the moment is a modular element of urban furniture called "Connect-chair" which integrates the most up-to-date technologies for printing stone with renewable energy self-generation systems (amorphous photovoltaic) which provides these urban objects with wireless and interactive IT tools, all of which is "off grid", therefore positionable anywhere, in an urban context or in natural surroundings. Participating in the project will be Paver, one of the largest prefabrication companies in Europe, and RSE, the national research centre for energy systems, and it will be launched in the form of a prototype at the SUN in Rimini, the International Exhibition of Outdoor Products scheduled for the end of October within the context of the exhibition, "Da Nido a Guscio – Outdoor Lighting" which I was invited to take part in by the magazine, Ottagono.
What kind of reception has 'GreenLantern' had so far?
Fantastic, I would say. After the presentation at April’s "Fuorisalone" in Milan, the Italian and international press welcomed the project with open arms. The most interesting thing is that GreenLantern has not only interested the sector press but also publications on economics, environmental sustainability, experimental technologies and fashion. This is because the route that led to the birth and realization of GreenLantern is an original, complex tale that combines creativity, research laboratories, artisanal companies and advanced technology outside any logic of a purely production variety.
Furthermore, GreenLantern makes an impact because at first glance, it’s not easy to understand what it is.
Its "primitive" shape embraces two elements of contradiction and equilibrium – the LED lights and the plant.
The possibilities of customization and differentiation "borrowed" from the automobile sector make it possible to make up the object in any way starting from a "basic" version which however respects the form and function of the object in toto including the possibility of personalizing the colours of the body, adding accessories such as an internal battery or touch activation, and even of choosing one-off editions and pieces customised by internationally famous writers and artists.
The iPhone app which allows such configurations saw 4,000 downloads in the first month on iTunes and there have been literally hundreds of requests.
This success among the public immediately made retailers and distributors interested in GreenLantern, and in the coming months it will be possible to find it in design shops, but not only, in various countries.
Please share your fondest memory of this project.
Without a doubt the dinner in 2006 where Stefano Besseghini, with regard to our first insights on the project exclaimed confidently: ‘Come on, let’s use liquid wood,’ with an answer from "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home": "and why didn’t I think of that immediately, then we wrap everything in some transparent aluminium packaging and the job’s done!" Two madmen I’d say, total craziness that led us to involve other madmen like us, among whom I’d like to mention Luca Rota, Martino Scolari, and Valentina Simonini with the lab and research technicians from Politec, Mitja "v3rbo" Bombardieri, Mr. Wany, Valerio Ciampicacigli, Diamond, Massimo Denti, Emiliano "Stand" Cataldo and Luigi Zuccoli. Sounds like a football team, but without them it would have been hard for me to make GreenLantern become reality.
What message do you have for our readers?
That it can be done. And I’m not talking about liquid wood or one particular result but of making ideas we believe in come true. If we’re crazy enough to measure ourselves against the world we live in, and not only in the specific sector where we feel at ease, we can discover new reference horizons, new outer limits for our creativity. And if we are convinced enough that these limits are made to be breached, as we are taught every day by research, racing drivers and cycling champions (a sport I have a particular passion for), then it’s enough to take a route whose exact destination we don’t know, which will become a "new" story worth telling, wherever it might end up.
Romolo, thank you so much for this extensive interview. We wish you all the very best for your future projects.
Romolo Stanco on Facebook.
Visit Romolo's blog.
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