bisque

This pendant lighting is reminiscent of a neat, beautiful white porcelain vessel. We drew a carefree and shapely figure, evoking ceramics ground on a lathe. The surface of the shade is coated to have slight textural irregularities that lend an unglazed feel.

The shade is formed through metal spinning technology in Edogawa, Tokyo. This is a manual metal processing technology in which a flat metal plate is rotated and pressed against a mould to cast a three-dimensional object of concentric circles.

This technique is used in a wide variety of areas such as in the aerospace industry for the nose cone of rockets as well as parabolic antennas.

We took on the challenge of making a pendant light using something that had caught our eye during a factory visit: the mould for the timpani, a percussion instrument used in classical orchestras. Making several prototypes revealed that using the timpani mould without modification ran contrary to the production concepts we had employed, in terms of the evolution of the product and its identity. Accordingly, we used the timpani mould but, to add our own essence, ended up creating 80% of the product body using the timpani molud and created a new mould for the remaining 20%. The biggest issue was to pare down a single product into two moulds and connect the pieces to finish the product as a single unit.

Bisque in English can mean unglazed china. To give a texture resembling white unglazed china on the metal-spun aluminum surface, the thin and lightweight aluminum is finished by spray.