Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper into beautiful shapes. The Folding Lamp features an even rarer form of origami: it elegantly folds light, giving a room any ambience you want it to have.
Designed by Belgian architect Thomas Hick, the Folding Lamp is a standard table lamp with an origami-like shade. The shade is made from perforated sheets of metal, which can be folded and unfolded around the LED bulb to create different configurations of light. You can also adjust the quality of the light just by delicately touching anywhere on the body.
The Folding Lamp should fit on almost any table, too: fully folded, the lamp is only 14-inches wide and 10-inches high, although it will obviously unfold to larger than that, if you wish. According to Hick, the inspiration for the Origami lamp came when he decided to create a personalized gift for a close friend who was getting married.
"I used to play around with paper and geometrical forms before, so I took the challenge of creating something beautiful from a plain sheet of metal," he says. "Due to other priorities, this project was put on hold for a while. One day, seeing my kids play creatively with scissors and paper it got me thinking about this forgotten project and inspired me to re-launch it."
The Folding Lamp is not yet available for sale, but it will be launching on Kickstarter later this year, for a still unpublished price. You can sign up to be emailed when it launches here.