by Loredana Mascheroni

Yves Béhar loves a challenge. And working with the company who produced the legendary Aeron office chair and many of the classic designs of Charles & Ray Eames must have seemed a chance of a lifetime. So much so that he has dedicated four years’ work to the development of a table lamp: Leaf.

But this seemingly small project encompassed a technological challenge that looks towards the future with the use of LEDs – highly robust, practically unlimited durability and low energy consumption. He also resolved their problem of excessive overheating without using complicated and costly mechanisms such as fans or water-based systems. This is the first product for the home developed by Herman Miller since the 1970s, and its positive reception was confirmation immediately after its official presentation at the ICFF in New York.

Leaf received two awards at NeoCon and has entered the permanent collection at MoMA in New York. Béhar and the company took state-of-the-art compact white LEDs as the important starting point in the project’s development, but it was not enough. To resolve the problem of overheating while maintaining a slender form, small holes were made in the lamp head. These small “chimneys” disperse the heat, which is taken up in a central “channel” and then follows the arm from the head down to the base.

It was also decided to switch the light on and off intermittently, with a frequency so high as to be imperceptible to the eye but enough to cool the head, which can be touched and moved to direct the light. The light can also be switched on and off with a touch or a movement of the hand, and the intensity can be changed to warmer or cooler according to functional needs or mood. Minimum weight, maximum luminosity and human interaction seems to be the brief that Béhar has tenaciously followed from 2002 to today. There is an aspect in the design of Leaf that the designer of fuseproject did not have to worry about: criteria of environmental sustainability.

For all its products Herman Miller adopts a rigid protocol that controls the chemical components of the materials used, ease of disassembly and level of recyclability. In other words, when you want to get rid of Leaf (which is made with 37% recycled material) only 5% is not recyclable.

https://www.fuseproject.com