Spider-209

My first product design project at IE University, and a deceptively hard one: take a well-known lamp and build our own version of it - using only materials found or recycled from the streets of Madrid. We chose Joe Colombo's Spider, a 1965 design for Oluce and a winner of the Compasso d'Oro in 1967, and reconfigured it as a desk lamp, fabricated from the ground up in metal, plastics, wood and electronics.

The interest wasn't in copying a lamp - it was in reproducing a precision design object from scrap. Colombo's Spider is an icon: a single fire-painted reflector on a chromed stem, its tilting joint elegant enough to put the lamp in the permanent collections of museums from Milan to Philadelphia. Rebuilding that from whatever Madrid's streets provided meant reverse-engineering its proportions and working out how to fake precision with found parts - a first lesson in looking at an object closely enough to remake it.

Research and drawings came first - studying the original closely enough to reproduce it from measurement rather than memory. Then a cardboard prototype to check proportion and assembly before committing materials. Then the working build.

The finished piece is Colombo's form, reproduced from what we could find - a desk lamp that reads as the original at a glance and is, underneath, entirely salvage. It's the first of a recurring theme in my work: building something considered out of materials that were headed for the bin.