In this new age of resource awareness and constraints on materials and energy, designers across the globe have been encouraged—and often compelled, owing to economic circumstance—to break down concepts into their constituent parts. Take the Tweety Lamp by designer Giorgio Bonaguro. This ingenious, stripped down take on the concept of delivering light reduces the prototypical lamp to its very bare necessities.

Tweety Lamp. Designed and Manufactured by Giorgio Bonaguro.

The Tweety Lamp is Simple and Simply Inspired

Though Bonaguro is to be lauded for the sustainable/eco-conscious bent of his reductionist lightpiece, even were we in an age of plenty, there’d be much here to admire. One can’t help but speculate on the Maestro Mies, and how he would have approved of Tweety’s simple strong design, its lack of ornamentation, its dual expression of structure as both supportive lynchpin and adornment.

The lamp is made up of the three elements that inhere in any lamp—in any light, for that matter: bulb, shade, and power source. The difference between Tweety and many other lights is in the way the former integrates these elements, the way it celebrates their very function without attempting to cover them up or otherwise embellish them.

Bonaguro’s three constituent parts take the form of a simple incandescent bulb, a colorful electrical cord, and a neatly bent length of sheet steel. The latter bears a likeness to a cubist birdhouse, with the central loop passing for the shelter and the slanting legs resembling the avian’s walls. The structure of the lamp thus accounts for Bonaguro’s chosen name, as the featured color of the cord (a sunny parakeet yellow) also evokes that famed and ever-cheerful bird, forever escaping the grasp of an equally famed, if hapless, perpetually hungry, and unredeemably cynical, black and white striped cat.

About the Designer: Milan-based industrial designer Giorgio Bonaguro studied mechanical engineering in Modena before going on to a master’s degree in Industrial and Interior Design at the Scuola Politecnica di Design. After bouncing around several different ateliers, he settled into his own groove with his own studio—bg industrial and interior design. His featured pieces include the Gallo Side Table and the Tweety Lamp, both of which evince a highly functional and surprisingly exuberant minimalism.