I may be the queen of pet peeves. Let’s just say if I were to keep a list, I might need a lot of ink! One of my daily frustrations, whether at home or on vacation, is clean surfaces. I don’t like clutter—more specifically, I don’t like things on surfaces I might otherwise use. This goes for small tchotchkes, but the same rule applies for functional objects. Lamps, for example. How many times have I sought to put a book or laptop down on a bedside table only to discover that I had to move a lamp out of the way. While the lamp should have provided light for me to read or work by, it only got in the way. This problem gets resolved beautifully and interestingly with Daiana, a lamp imagined by Soup Studio, an Italian design group.

Daiana Floor Lamp. Manufactured by Soup Studio.

Subversive Upside Down Floor Lamp

Admittedly, Daiana is a floor lamp, not a table lamp, but it has what I might term spatial integrity. The floor space it takes up provides a valuable surface on which you can put down books, keys, phones, or a cup of coffee. Thanks to Daiana’s upside down design, “everything changes”: the lamp’s shade is found at the base of the light, where it serves as a table. It is the stem that glows, allowing the shade and stem to exhibit a welcomed functionality.

The effect of Daiana is unexpected in a subtle way. You might even say the floor lamp by Soup Studio is subversive. At first glance, it looks enough like a lamp—after all, the shape of the shade and base of a lamp can often be similar (both are often circular). But the longer you look at it, the more Daiana seems slightly off. Because of its iconic lamp shape, viewers miss its upside down form. It is an everyday object that seems like an everyday object yet makes you analyze the nature of an everyday object—it’s fun to get all mixed up with Soup!

About the Manufacturer: Soup Studio is a Milan-based design studio that works on projects as diverse as interiors, graphic design, and product development. The group of designers behind the firm got together to combine their “common and conflicting interests and temperaments” in an effort to push aesthetic margins: “Soup Studio is critical, proactive and curious about the design of its subsets and its boundaries.”