Nemo Lighting’s Lampe de Marseille is a sculptural wall light designed by the world-famous architect Le Corbusier for the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille at the turn of the 1950s. The position of the light is easy to adjust since the arm features two joints and turns from side to side. The striking shade consists of two aluminium cones that offer direct and indirect light. Lampe de Marseille is a true statement piece that has and will stand the test of time.
Length: 166 cm
Diameter: 50 cm
Height: Shade 40 cm
Cable length: 280 cm
Cable colour: Black
Cable material: Plastic
Spun aluminium
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was born at La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss Jura, in 1887; he died in France, at Cap Martin, on the French Côte d’Azur, in 1965.
Early in his career his work met with some resistance owing to its alleged «revolutionary» nature and the radical look it acquired from its «purist» experiments; in time , however, it won the recognition it deserved and it is still widely admired. His message is still being assimilated by an ever increasing number of people in the profession, but his far-out avant-garde attitudes should be interpreted with due consideration for the use of rational systems in his planning method, evidenced by extremely simple modules and formes based on the functional logic.
«Functionalism tending not so much to an exaltation of the mechanical function at the expense of the symbolic, as to the rejection of symbol that he now considers outmoded and insignificant and the restoration of the pratical function as a symbol of new values»(¹)
In his activities as town-planner, architect and designer, his method of research continued to develop, at times going to the opposite extremes of a rich plastic idiom.