A gift out of Armenia

Lamp shades made in Armenia, given as gifts

A great deal of building here has been a matter of cutting light with stone. A printed shade does the same job at the size of a table, out of a millimetre of translucent plastic instead of a wall of volcanic rock, and with the same intention.

One opening, and it was in the ceiling

The old highland house is the glkhatun, the head house. It is a large room, often dug into the side of a slope, with an earthen floor, retaining walls of volcanic rock, and no opening at all except the door and the yerdik: an oculus in the roof above the hearth, which the smoke went out through¹.

Think about what that does to a room. There is no window. All day, one shaft of light comes down through a hole and moves across the floor, and the only thing deciding its shape is the roof. The roof was worth the trouble. It is the hazarashen, and the name comes from the thousand pieces of wood in it: frames of eight to twelve corners laid parallel to the walls, each small frame resting on the larger one below, leaving a hole at the top². Scholars read it as the ancestor of the early Christian church dome¹, which means the most recognisable roofline in the country began as a way of holding up a hole that let the light in.

Then the whole city was cut out of ash

Above ground the same argument runs at city scale. Yerevan was rebuilt on Alexander Tamanian's 1924 plan and faced almost entirely in the local volcanic tuff, mostly pink, which is where the city gets its nickname³. Tuff is hardened volcanic ash, porous, light and easy to saw, and it comes violet pink out of Artik, yellow and orange and white out of Ani, black and red out of Yerevan and Gyumri⁴.

Face a street in a porous pink stone and the light that reaches a room has already been through something. It arrives warm, and it arrives soft, because it has bounced off a wall that is the colour of the inside of a shell. That is not a metaphor. Light off a rough pink surface arrives a little warmer and a little softer than it set out, and it is the reason every shade here is drawn pale and translucent rather than dark: the wall of the shade is meant to be the thing that glows.

What changed, and what did not

A shade and a yerdik do the same job. Both decide where the light goes and what shape it makes when it lands. Stone did it with mass, which is a slow and expensive way to change your mind. A 1.0 to 1.4 mm translucent wall does it by how much light gets through, which means the pattern on your wall can be drawn, tested in a dark room, and redrawn on a Tuesday.

That is the only modern claim on this page. There is no ornament here borrowed from a carved facade, and nothing is stamped to look Armenian. The continuity is in the operation: somebody decides what the light does, on purpose, before the room is lived in.

What it is like to carry

The cone is the one to fly with. Cluster Cone 165 is 140 mm across and 175 grams, with no electrics in it and nothing to break: it is a printed shell, and the person it is going to already owns a lamp to put it on. The Table Halo 190 travels too, at 190 mm across and 245 grams.

A 1.2 mm shell likes the middle of the case with a shoe on either side, and it arrives the shape it left. The 280 mm pendant and the 260 mm floor shade are better posted, and they go tracked from Yerevan to wherever the person opening it lives. Every figure here is the drawn one, taken off the file the piece is printed from.

Who it suits

Somebody whose flat is lit from the ceiling by one bare bulb and who has never quite got round to doing anything about it. A cone needs nothing from them but the lampholder already up there. For anything larger, send a photograph of the room at night in the thread and the shade can be drawn for a wall nobody here has ever seen.