BY HANS HERTEL

good light

good light

& GOOD LIFE

Poul Henningsen – the lighting pio-

neer and enlightened genius

who helped shape contempo-

rary Denmark and ‘the Scan-

dinavian Model’

By Hans Hertel

Vain mother and young

inventor

Poul Henningsen (1894–1967) – per-

haps better known as PH – was an architect

and much, much more. He loved to relate how the story

of his famous PH lamp began. The first seed of an idea

began to germinate in 1907 when, aged 13, he moved

with his family from the small town of Roskilde, where

kerosene lamps were still used for lighting, to the me-

tropolis of Copenhagen, where the revolutionary electric

illumination had already arrived.

The transfer from malodorous gas and kerosene lamps

to electric incandescent lamps was a giant leap forward

from the perspectives of both civilisation and hygiene,

and Edison’s first carbon filament light bulb produced

truly beautiful light. However, the subsequent spiral

light bulbs – bare or with opalised, milky glass – sprayed

light out over rooms, streets and people at the cost of

the quality of the light. PH’s mother was very vain, he

related, explaining that “she maintained strict control of

the lighting to ensure she stayed sufficiently pretty ...

the lighting level had to be soft and pleasing”. For this

reason, the young Poul Henningsen took it upon himself

to eliminate the glare from all the lamps in the house.

PH was what could best be described as a Jack-of-all-

trades. He was a multi-talented artist: architect, inven-

tor, designer, songwriter, lyricist and film-maker. He was

also an art and architecture critic, before becoming a

general culture critic and debate contributor – and finally

a kind of popular pedagogue. The various sides of his

character cross-pollinated one another, but practice took

precedence over theory.

PH was a child of the famous ‘free love’ of the 1890s.

His mother, the author Agnes Henningsen, gave birth to

him outside of wedlock and his father was a Copenha-

gen journalist and bohemian. He was placed in care with

a joiner and his family who lived in a provincial town,

and on his third birthday, his adoptive family presented

him with a planing bench. This was a very perspective

gift from the joiner, because pure skill and a tactile rela-

tionship to materials and tools played a key role in PH’s

creativity from the very start.

“My creative life was centred on the technical,” he said,

and referred to himself as a joiner, mason and mechanic.

As a boy, he built model aeroplanes, trolleys and kites,

and at the age of 17 he was awarded a grant for having

invented a ‘self-pumping bicycle’. From 1919 onwards,

he concentrated on lamps. To start with, he focused on

prism chandeliers and ruby shades intended to make

his mother prettier, but he gradually started to work on

more general lighting issues.

Applied art and the beauty of light

Poul Henningsen was apprenticed to a mason and took

courses in construction theory and mathematics. How-

ever, he was actually an autodidact. From 1919 he

worked on the construction of residences, and in 1921

he became an architectural staff writer for the Danish

newspaper Politiken – the first in the Nordic region. His

construction page was devoted to buildings and applied

art, traffic, urban and rural planning, and everyday ob-

jects from the city environment: everything from adver-

tising columns and newsstands to telephone boxes and

street lights. Behind it all lay a new social concept of

architecture which states that architecture is applied art

intended to build societies and improve conditions for

people’s lives in light and air, freedom and equality. De-

sign is defined by function, and it is preferable to build

in contemporary style – not in the stylised architecture of

faux ‘empire’ grandeur.

PH also wrote about light and sought what he termed a

natural science solution: “light that showcases beautiful

things in the best possible way – beautiful shapes, beau-

tiful colours, beautiful fabrics”, as he wrote in 1924. The

challenge was to shade and redirect the light to make

it a practical, decorative and a contrasting element. This

was the issue he worked on in primitive light workshops

that he set up in his houses. In 1921, he drew a multi-

shade ‘snowball’ pendant for a cubist dining room in

Aalborg, and one of his outdoor lamps was installed in

Copenhagen.

Giant leap and white birds

DPH achieved his first giant leap in 1925 when he cre-

ated new types of lamp for an international industrial art

exhibition in Paris: the Exposition Internationale des Arts

Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which gave its name

to the elegant Art Déco style. One of the criteria for the

exhibition was a complete prohibition on copying; every-

thing had to be shaped on the basis of modern ideals of

beauty. PH’s six table lamps and pendants – presented in

ten versions including a giant spherical chandelier – won

six gold medals. They revitalised shape, anti-glare, light-

ing control and light economy, and they aligned with PH’s

ideal: to design everyday items so that they could be de-

mocratised in machine-based standardisation. However,

the models were expensive to make.

PH’s next giant leap came in autumn of the same year,

when he took a radical step and developed the distinc-

tive PH lamp with three shades. In the same way as the

Parisian lamp, it was made by Louis Poulsen & Co. – his

partner since 1924 – and it was something of a com-

mercial scoop when in the winter of 1926, the company

bested two German competitors to win the contract for

lighting an international car exhibition at Forum, the new

exhibition centre in Copenhagen. The company quickly

produced 120 of the new lamps, and when they were

suspended from the ceiling in Forum, one newspaper

wrote: “The white birds flew through the giant hall”.

The birds were soon also flying in thousands of homes,

restaurants, offices and institutions. In just the first year,

12,000 lamps were sold in Denmark, and suspended

and standing versions were made by the Deutsche PH-

Lampenfabrik in Karlsruhe, Germany, and marketed in

numerous countries, in parallel with new branded goods

including furniture, gramophones, typewriters and cars.

In 1929, the lamp was installed at Cologne Railway Sta-

tion, while a campaign in the Danish press prevented

‘these modern horrors’ being purchased for Copenhagen

Central Station.

Spiral pattern and brand

With the three-shade model – plate, bowl and cup, as

he himself described it – PH had arrived at a simple con-

cept: warm, glare-free, uniform light with soft shadows

in a neat compromise between enclosure, utilisation of

the sensory quality of the light, and aesthetic beauty.

In the wake of the Paris exhibition, he proudly referred

to himself as a ‘master lighter’ and later as a ‘lampist’.

Over the next 40 years, he developed versions of the

‘PH system’ for standing lights, table lights, pendants

and ceiling lights in opalised glass, copper and bronze,

painted and coloured – in shade, chandelier, ball, spiral

and plate shapes. As well as tennis, dentist’s, operating

theatre, restaurant and street lamps.

The PH lamp followed the clearly defined shapes of cub-

ism and the geometric curves of the lamp itself: the

logarithmic spiral became an archetypal pattern in PH’s

design. He was unabashedly committed to becoming a

brand. The success of his lamps made his initials – PH – a

trademark that he also wrote in giant letters on his kites

and at exhibitions.

The PH ‘brand’ was reinforced by his controversial journal

entitled Kritisk Revy. Over a period of three years from

1926 through 1928, it grew to be known and feared

for its fight to renew culture in the context of building,

homes and other areas. It was feared by older architects

on account of its insubordinate impartiality – and revered

by young architects throughout Scandinavia, including

the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto.

Josephine Baker and Scandinavian Modern

PH’s reputation as the brash rebel grew in 1928, when

Josephine Baker, appearing as a guest performer in Co-

penhagen, was attacked by misogynist and racist ‘guard-

ians of morality’. PH was quick to defend her ‘naked

naturalness’, and she taught him something new about

the body and rhythm. From 1929 onwards, he became a

renewer of revue art by creating a socially critical opin-

ion revue, as well as a new form of ballad based on the

spoken language and jazz rhythms.

In his perspectives on architecture and design, PH was a

sceptical modernist. He was critical of exterior formalism

in much of the ultra-modern style of the time, but there

are key similarities between his work and Bauhaus, the

Dutch ‘De Stijl’ and the work of the French architect Le

Corbusier. His ideal centred on simple, functional shapes

in materials suitable for batch production.

He also encountered this style at the Stockholm exhibi-

tion in 1930, which coined the concept of functionalism,

more commonly known internationally as Scandinavian

Modern. PH lauded the new types of residence and fur-

niture showcased at the exhibition, the elegant and cool

moderation, the new values of beauty in steel, glass and

cement, and in the use of the light.

Functionalism and ‘The Modern’

PH viewed functionalism and cubism as the style of the

age, impartial and classless, and he expanded this into

a broad socio-political programme. In ‘The Modern’, de-

mocracy, critical humanism, internationalism and new

shape were different sides of the same coin. He neatly

termed this democracy’s light summer programme, and

it also encompassed female emancipation and – most

controversially of all – an honest sexual morality for

young people.

He believed that the new art forms of the age exerted

indirect political influence by “changing mentality in a

modern direction” , and in 1934 he wrote that the “most

important cultural results” of democracy are “function-

alism, jazz, dance, outdoor living and the passion that

flows inevitably from it”. That flows inevitably from it –

how very picturesque! How very provocative.

The Modern programme was diametrically opposed to

reaction and reactionary ideals in any shape or form –

particularly the type that came sneaking up from Nazi

Germany in 1933, infecting the Danish people with iras-

cible nationalism. PH collided head-on with this move-

ment in 1935, when he made his film about Denmark for

the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The film presents a

poetic image of the modern, hard-working country, but

it was attacked for being ‘unpatriotic’ – and for its jazz

soundtrack, which the critics contemptuously referred to

as ‘black man’s music’. PH tirelessly promoted a cultural

battle against Nazism and in favour of the freedom of

expression that was being undermined by the threats

from Germany.

Icon and safety net

“He who seeks coherence must diversify,” wrote PH in

1932, and over the next 30 years he made diversification

an art form. One part of him wrote articles and edited

journals. Another composed revue ballads and made

films. A third designed factories and houses, furniture

made of steel tubing and a famous glass piano. A fourth

spoke at lectures and debates all over Denmark. A fifth

devoted itself to creating new lamp models.

In 1935 he introduced the Globe, in 1942 the Tivoli and

Spiral lamp, and the post-war years were distinguished

by a chain of new initiatives: the Louvre in 1957; the

Snowball, the floating Artichoke and the simple, highly

popular A5 in 1958; the Contrast lamp in 1962; and the

elegant Spiral lamp in 1964.

Today, the PH lamp is an icon that is on display in design

museums from New York to Tokyo, but it also took on

financial significance as a safety net for PH. When, as an

anti-Nazi, he was forced to flee to Sweden in 1943, he

supported himself by producing a version of the lamp

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with a pleated paper shade and selling it through the Co-

operation. For 42 years, Louis Poulsen & Co. was both his

creative environment and a base that made him inde-

pendent of media, authorities and organisations when

he baited public opinion.

From a stylistic perspective, too, it is possible to deter-

mine a consistent theme. The logarithmic spiral of the

PH lamp is repeated in his snail-shapes and spirals –

from the circular movements of the camera around the

towers of Copenhagen in Danmarksfilmen to his snake

chairs, spiral staircases and lamps. The spiral symbolises

dynamism: his belief in progress and his dream of the

creative community.

PH was a cross between a socialist, a liberal individualist

and quasi-anarchist. He was bitterly opposed to ‘the en-

emies of life’ as he called them, i.e. everything that binds

our mouths and hands: prejudice, habitual thinking, in-

tolerance and hypocrisy. His mantra was: the individual

before parties, organisations, religions and authorities.

The individual before the state. With his clarity and his

courage, his perseverance and his insubordinate impact,

he played a key role in shaping contemporary Denmark

and ‘the Scandinavian Model’ – as a style as well. He

demanded quality for the framework that surrounds our

lives – and the light in which we view it. Neon light was

one of ‘the enemies of life’. In the Louis Poulsen maga-

zine, which he edited for 25 years, he railed against the

plague of the fluorescent light – the garish light that only

serves for plastic colours, paints people’s faces the bluish

white hue of skimmed milk, and which is only good for

“cases where ladies want to have unsightly hair growth

removed” in his opinion. In this context, he anticipated

the halogen lamps and energy-saving bulbs of our mod-

ern age.

A core concept of PH’s lighting philosophy is that lighting

culture is both art and design for living. Light is subju-

gated to physiological laws; it generates well-being, a

spatial and sensory experience, irrespective of whether

we are eating, making love, working, playing sport, tak-

ing lessons or looking at art.

Above all, PH was an artist. His works of genius are the

journal Kritisk Revy, his esteemed Danmarksfilmen, his

renewal of the revue – and, first and foremost, the PH

Lamp. During his twilight years, his cultural criticism

became shaded by cultural pessimism. He feared that

‘industrial dictatorship’, consumerism, advertising and

mass media pop would brainwash us into petty bour-

geois conformism. He even compared this – somewhat

drastically – to the servitude of Nazism.

As an artist, however, he kept on working to the end,

playing with kites and words and fixtures – the models

that can still be adapted to new settings all over the

world.

Spirit and light

The quality of the light – and the constancy of the light,

we may add, because an historical perspective applies.

The classics speak to each other across the centuries.

In 1926, Otto Gelsted – and author friend of PH – wrote

an ode to the PH lamp. It lauds ‘the shining logic of the

lamp’ where ‘Of light and soul the pact / Re-enacts’.

Several years later, Otto Gelsted sent his friend two lines

written by the Lyricist Thøger Larsen, which he recalled

as: “It was the same sunshine, / that Isaac Newton saw.”

The beauty of these lines is not just the rhythm and

the letter rhyme, but also the vision. I see two images:

1667, Trinity College Cambridge – the eminent physicist

Newton discovers that white light is composed of all the

colours in the spectrum. 1925 – PH is working with a

candle and a piece of paper in the black-painted attic in

his terraced house – and arrives at his illuminating logic.

It is no coincidence that the enlightenment movement

of the 1700s is named after the concept of physical light

in many major languages: Enlightenment in English, illu-

minismo in Italian, Aufklärung in German, la Illustracíon

in Spanish, and les lumières in French. PH the light-mak-

er was a man of the Enlightenment, inextricably bound

to its fundamental values: scientific reason, freedom of

belief and expression, human rights, and humanistic tol-

erance. Particularly when following his shining path and

his vision: good light as a part of good life.

& QUALITYfreedom

www.louispoulsen.com

Why is the PH lamp the only lamp that ever gets copied?

Text and drawing by Poul Henningsen, 1931 newspaper advertisement