If you’re under the mistaken impression that the contemporary lexicon of retail lighting solutions is limited to recessed lights, flush mount lights, pendant lights, and—God forbid—track lights, apparently you missed out on a crucial exhibit at the recently-concluded NeoCon Furniture Fair: 3M Architectural Market’s Air and Flex lighting modules.

Air and Flex Lighting. Manufactured by 3M Architectural Market.

Stretch Your Lighting Solutions with 3M’s Flex and Air

Even if you weren’t able to attend NeoCon and see these exciting new modular lights in full illuminatory action, you might infer from the respective names that they’re both vibrant and vivacious—light and lithe, dynamic and responsive.

A circular nimbus of free-form floating light, Air is both functional and fantastically strange. Of course, looking at these interlocking rings of circular light (check the 3M website for info. about custom sizes), I can’t help but be reminded of the infamous prisoner rings from the original Superman, which shackled and secured interstellar convicts without laying so much as a finger on them.

Flex, for its part, is equally dynamic and innovative, similarly movement-oriented, and, as you might infer, extraordinarily flexible too. Comprised of different modules of “Illuminated curves, straightaways, and T’s,” Flex goes where you need it to, with a modicum of persuasion: snaking up walls, meandering under soffits, even sketching a serpentine path across the ceiling of the very darkest of hallways.

Both Air and Flex feature lightweight components with energy-efficient replaceable LEDs: “to create an exceptionally even, luminous white glow.”

About the Manufacturer: Not just about sticky tabs, the company known as 3M is, in fact involved in architecture and design at multiple levels, various complexities. The architectural arm specializes in interior finishes, glass surfaces for inside and out, and lighting solutions—such as the recently-debuted Flex and Air modular systems, each of which opens up new horizons in flexible, adaptable, and attractive illumination.