In May 2011 we wrote a post laying out the few facts we had been able to gather together during ten years of trawling through books, magazines, research libraries, personal contacts and the internet for information about Jo Hammerborg’s life and work at Fog & Mørup, and appealed for readers with any further information to contact us. Today, thanks to the generous assistance of Jo Hammerborg’s family, we have been able to add to that original post (which you can read here) a considerable amount of new information, in honour of which we have built a brand new website at johammerborg.com. We hope you will enjoy it.
Month: November 2012
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Our new website dedicated to Jo Hammerborg
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Solved! the Danish star light designer mystery
A couple of years ago we wrote a post (which you can read here) about the fact that we had been unable to find reliable information about the origins of one of our favourite vintage Danish lights, a large and spiky creation that for obvious reasons we dubbed the star light. While various designers’ names had been mooted by auction houses and dealers, none of the claims were supported by original primary sources, and we had never found such a source ourselves.
Then just last week we were delighted to receive an email from Elisabeth Jensen, daughter of Danish architect Anton Fogh Holm (1922–2005), who confirmed that the light had been designed for Nordisk Solar Compagni by her father together with Alfred J Andersen. The pair were also partners in an architectural practice in the town of Kolding. Elisabeth remembers her father referring to the light as “the Sydney light”, but it is unclear whether that name was also used by Nordisk Solar Compagni.Elisabeth reveals that her father designed other lights too, but these remained in private circulation amongst family and friends and were never put into general production – until Anton Fogh Holm’s grandson Kim Aagaard Holm revived and slightly modified his grandfather’s design for a self-assembly lamp made of card. Kim put the Holm lamp, as it was now called, into production in association with Aslaug Copenhagen in 2008.
Anton Fogh Holm, image courtesy of Elisabeth Jensen