I love the play with perspective going on in the new “A Piece of Forest” lighting installation designed by Modern Times. The piece is a hexagonally-structured modular light whose quantity and quality of different configurations is limited only by user fatigue or the achievement of some sort of individualized quintessence. But the subjective nature of that makes it up for debate, of course, and who knows how many aesthetic variations can be made of this charming and changeable lightpiece.

A Piece of Forest. Designed by Modern Times for Södra Pulp Labs.

Sodra Labs and DuraPulp on Display in a Beautiful Modular Luminaire

The pieces of A Piece of Forest are smallish six-sided pods that overlap and abut one another to form an intriguing accretion of shapes and sizes. In the recent Salone display A Piece of Forest resembled a cubist interpretation of a bushy-topped deciduous tree, complete with a perfectly hexagonal branching habit and a cool organic color palette of deep greens and contemplative blues. Close-up images of the piece, however, belie the strict geometricity as they reveal the true scope of A Piece of Forest’s three-dimensionality. Each pod contains an LED strip on the sides and tops—the point of contact that allows light transmission between the pods: “In each pod hides one LED-module that gently shines on neighbouring pods and a glowing landscape spreads out. The light is coloured by the different coloured pods and affords character to the significant space.”

A Piece of Forest is created out of Södra Lab’s revolutionary pulp fiber composite material. This sustainable product is comprised of polylactic acid—“a biologically degradable polymer produced from starch”–and wood pulp, giving it the aesthetic appeal and organicism of wood and the versatility of plastic. A Piece of Forest is available as a floor lamp or pendant luminaire.

About the Manufacturer: Södra Pulp Labs manufactures DuraPulp, a composite material made out of select wood (or paper) pulp and a starch-based polymer. Essentially, DuraPulp products are a hybrid of corn and paper. Besides the obvious incentives for creating such a product—like abundant raw materials, renewability, and energy-efficient production—the advantages extend into portability and aesthetic appeal. Products made from DuraPulp are lightweight and versatile. They can take on the angular aspect of the W101 Lamp, the organic contours of “A Piece of Forest,” and just about anything in between.