Loci Lamp
Your table’s centerpiece for your shared meals for years to come. These glowing disks of light and reflection will become the loci of your table, the gravitational center of the gathering.
Loci is a lamp composed of suspended CNC-engraved recycled-glass enameled disks that cast interesting and varying shadows, moving with the gathering around them.
Loci is made to be jostled, to sway when touched and the table knocked. To be played with and investigated.
Loci acts as a centerpiece of the food gathering, embodying romanticism, and emitting a flattering light.
Form Finding
Enamel’s unique and engrossing interplay of light heavily informed the lamp design. Sketches explored how a lamp could incorporate enamel to make a centerpiece for a communal table. Prototypes explored ways of facilitating movement; utilizing suspension allowed the movement and energy of the gathering to play across the surface of the enameled domes.
Material Challenge
Traditional enameling is done with specialty vitreous enamel powder, but enameling is simply the process of heating powdered glass to high temperatures such that it fuses to metal. I wanted to know if I could enamel with recycled glass. Rigorous testing led to successful enameling with transparent frit from a captured waste stream.
I was fascinated with the technique of Guilloche, which is decorative engraving using a specialized device called a rose engine lathe. I wondered – how could this effect be recreated using modern, automated tools? How could this high end and inaccessible dying art be manufactured more efficiently?
I designed vector patterns with close repetitive lines to CNC engrave based on traditional guilloche patterns. While I was able to successfully engrave using a desktop ShopBot, there were many issues I was forced to manually mitigate that could be resolved with more specialized equipment.
Life Cycle
Enamel is heat bonded to glass, which means there is no adhesive. The two materials can be separated through mechanical force: smashing them results in glass particulates and copper pieces, ready to be remade.
