The lovely folks over at Brook Farm General Store in Brooklyn tipped us off to their newest product: the Lampe Gras. They have a wide range of products in stock, including beautiful items for around your home, and are currently the only store on the East Coast to carry the original architect’s lamp.

First designed by young engineer Bernard-Albin Gras for use in offices and industrial environments in 1921, the Lampe Gras became the ideal French architect lamp for its simple yet beautiful design. Without screws or welded joints in the basic form, it is an adjustable lamp with a chrome base and head refined for reading and working at the table.

The Lampe Gras was one of the first items created for industrial use to become embraced in everyday interior decorating. During the golden age of design in France in the 1920s, the Lampe Gras exemplified the perfect blend of form and function that came to define the style of the period.

Many lights are described as architects’ lamps, but only the Lampe Gras can claim the distinction of being not only the first architect lamp, but the favorite of the godfather of modern architecture himself—Le Corbusier. As one of Bernard-Albin Gras’s most enthusiastic supporters, he championed the lamps as modern classics, describing them as a ‘type-objet’; an object reduced to its pure function. He and other well known  avant-garde figures like Henri Matisse adopted the lamps for their own offices and studios for projects all over the world.

Production of the Gras Lamps stopped at the outbreak of World War II, and after over a year of experimentation and careful study, they are once again being hand-made in France.

For more information on these modernist table lamps, visit the Brook Farm General Store site or head on over to their brick and mortar store in Brooklyn, NY:

Brook Farm General Store

75 South 6th St.

Brooklyn, NY 11211

718-388-8642

Posted by Nicole Bruce