For at least a year or maybe two I have been complaining
about the lack of light in the evening by the computer. It’s fine in the daytime but when the sun
goes down the ceiling light in the center of the room just does not give off
enough light. A bulb with higher light
output would help but the ceiling fan fixture has a candelabra base so I am
limited in wattage. Besides the light is
behind me so the stuff on the desk can easily end up in my shadow.
I have looked on-line and in stores for a couple of years
and nothing I could find looked like it would work or was something that I
liked. I had pretty much given up on
buying something and had been playing around with building one using a
combination of wood and stained glass.
Nothing I had come up with met my light output, size and aesthetic
requirements.
I just kept plugging away trying different designs and
ideas with not much luck. Then while we
were in Phoenix on a short vacation we stopped by Frank Lloyd Wright’s
architecture school Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. There in the gift shop was a floor lamp
($2,200) and a desk lamp ($1,200) of his design. In looking at them I thought a variation of
that design might work.
I do have to say that this is not my first contact with
this design style. In the late 1960’s
while on a vacation with my parents my dad took a photo of a similar light at
Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
A few years later I did some drawings from that photo and we built a
copy to go in an A-frame cabin we built.
The only problem with that lamp was in order to provide enough light it
had eight 40-watt bulbs in it. That adds
up to a lot of heat and eventually the finish on the underside of the
horizontal baffles got so hot it discolored and blistered. A dimmer solved that problem to the detriment
of light output. Fast forward to 2017
and by using a 6.5 watt LED bulb I can get a greater light output than from
that old 40 watt incandescent plus solving the heat problem.
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| Original Fixture at Taliesin East (left) Reproduction (right) |
Back home I opened up SketchUp and began working on the
design. After a fair amount of pushing
and pulling the initial design ended up with four lit sections and was 47 ½”
tall. I let it set while I finished some
other projects. When I got back to
working on the design it needed a couple of tweaks and then looked good enough
to me to move on to the next stage, building a mockup.
As I was really only interested in the overall form I
made the mockup out of wood scraps from earlier projects and cardboard. I had in mind that I was going to set it behind
the monitor but it just did not fit right.
I also had thought about putting it at the end of the desk. That worked out better and it looked good but
was too tall for the space. At my wife’s
suggestion, I added the LED bulbs to check on the illumination. That worked alright but the bottom section
really put too much light right at the base giving me a hot spot.
After some deliberation, I decided to do a drawing
revision removing the bottom light section, reducing the size of the base and
cutting off 6” of the central column. I
also did a new drawing showing the light in place on the desk and it seemed to
be much more in scale with the desk and room.
Taking the mockup back out to the shop I made those
changes except for reducing the size of the base then brought it back in. The changes made quite a difference, the
scale fit the room and the hot spot at the base of the light was gone.
With the design set or at least set until I start
construction 😊 I had a couple of decisions to make before I
could really get going. First, was which
wood to use to make the light. Second,
was what to construct the baffles out of, solid wood or plywood.
For the wood, the originals that I have seen are made out
of dark woods or stained plywood and white painted baffles. At Taliesin West, one was made out of cherry
and one looked to be made out of walnut.
Because I wanted to get good reflection from the light bulbs off the
baffles I decided to go with a lighter wood like oak or maple. I decided to use maple rather than oak
because I did not want the relative coarseness of the open pores in the grain
of the oak. The maple has much smaller
pores and the grain is more subdued. I
will probably lightly stain it maybe an amber tone. Something like what antique maple looks like.
The second decision has been more difficult, that of what
to make the baffles out of. The original
fixtures I have seen have all had the baffles made out of plywood roughly ¼” or
so thick. The edges were left raw. By that I mean the individual plies of
plywood were left exposed. However,
since the original's edges were stained dark or painted white the wood plies are not very visible. Since I am going with a lighter wood the
plies would certainly stand out, a lot.
I considered veneering the raw edges but am worried that since the lamp
will be observed at very close range that even the joints between the veneers
would stand out.
The other option is to make them out of solid wood but at
a quarter of an inch thick I am worried that solid wood could warp. As a matter of fact, when I made a
two-section version of the lamp in 1972 and used ¼” plywood for the baffles
they warped. Right now, I am leaning
toward making the baffles slightly thicker, somewhere between 5/16” and
3/8”. Although making them thicker would
reduce the chance of them warping I need to keep them as thin as I can to
preserve their visual lightness. The
good news is the maple I am planning on using I have had for 10+ years so it
should be stable. Although, when I rip
it into thinner pieces who knows if or how it will move.
Next Up – Starting Baffles & Center Column
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