Kristiina, a reader from Finland, recently brought our attention to an item for sale on Finnish auction website Huuto – a lamp that, using our ID Your Vintage Danish Lights site, she had identified as a Nordisk Solar Compagni P278g glass pendant light. Interestingly, however, the glass was embellished with an Iittala Oy glassworks sticker (pictured bottom).
There are three possible explanations for this surprising detail. One is that someone added the sticker at a later date and it actually has nothing to do with the light. The second is that Iittala licensed the design from Nordisk Solar Compagni and produced the light in Finland. And the third is that Nordisk Solar contracted out the production of glass for its lamps to Iittala rather than Holmegaard (the home-grown choice of Fog & Mørup) or Orrefors (Lyfa’s preferred glass producer).
One of the features that has driven the increasing popularity of 60s and 70s Fog & Mørup lighting as a target for collectors – along with the consistently high quality and design excellence of the individual lights themselves and the cohesiveness of the F&M brand as a whole during this period – has been the fact that (with the exception of the Semi) the lights have never been reproduced. This has given the lights a scarcity value and has made them attractive to new collectors, who have not needed to study up on subtle historical design and production changes to be sure that they are buying a vintage model rather than one made last year.
The economic downturn of the 1970s brought new challenges for the designers of high-end lamps and other luxury goods, as producers’ support for the experiments of the 1960s gave way to a constant refrain of “No thanks”, “It’s too expensive”, or “It can’t be sold”.
It can be an uplighter one day, a downlighter the next, an asymmetrical art light the third. “It’s a bit more complex,” says Weisdorf about this light. 
The Ekko is another of Louis Weisdorf’s designs based on repeating – or echoing – elements, though in this case the angular metallic sections take two forms, the two end pieces differing from the three central ones.
– while still at Tivoli – set up his own design studio in Kompagnistræde in Copenhagen’s old city, sharing the premises with architect Ole Panton (the younger brother of Verner), who also designed lamps. The Ekko had a diameter of 19cm and a height of 32cm, and came in two colour schemes – orange/terracotta and lilac/violet. 
Louis Weisdorf created the design for his Turbo pendant light in 1965, and in 1967 
to Weisdorf’s guiding principle of shielding the eye from direct bulb glare at all angles. Like other experimental lights of that decade, it was expensive – the larger version, Turbo II, coming with a price tag not much below an average worker’s monthly wage.
Much later – in 1991 – a new version of the Turbo was put into production by the further-merged company Lyskjær-Lyfa, without the knowledge or approval of Louis Weisdorf. Renamed Regina and made of steel, the lamp was so heavy it had to be suspended by a wire. Weisdorf took the company to court and sales were halted.
interest in Weisdorf’s lighting designs, and rekindled his passion for lamp design after 25 years during which he became one of the first Danish architects to move into the digital era and start using computer-aided design (CAD). The rediscovered lighting enthusiasm led to models of new lamp designs beginning to appear on his computer screens.
In the Facet pendant light, designed by Louis Weisdorf in 1963 and produced by 
How did Weisdorf think up the Facet? “I have always been interested in creating lights from a single element that could be repeated and built together in various fashions, fitting into each other, turned, stacked, hung in various ways and so on,” he says. “Since my youth I seemed to have an ability to visualise things in space, to see how forms function together in space. This was probably why I was accepted into architecture school in the first place.”
During the war the 11-year-old Weisdorf had to stay in Sweden for some years, and missed so much schooling that he was prevented from going on to high school. That didn’t stop him from finding a back door to academic studies by taking a preliminary year at engineering school (intended for craftsmen), then applying for admittance to the Royal Academy at the unusually early age of 17. Against all odds he was accepted on to the course, and during the three-month trial period the teachers spotted someone with a special gift in spatial geometry.
This talent was of course used on the 
and, like the Konkylie, its production was contracted out by Lyfa to the Brødrene Berg factory. Its colour schemes harmonised with the Konkylie – one version golden outside with two shades of orange inside, the other silver outside and two shades of blue inside. 
In 1963 when Danish architect Louis Weisdorf made the drawings for Konkylie, the first of his light designs, nine years had passed since (aged 22) he’d been one of the youngest ever graduates of Copenhagen’s Royal Academy, and he was a couple of years into a 10-year assignment at the city’s recreation park, Tivoli Gardens.
discussions at Lyfa meant Weisdorf was well placed when the time came to present his own light designs.
was made in transparent opal white plastic, because Weisdorf wanted it to be a good general light source. But the project really started rolling when Tivoli accepted his suggestion of a gold metallic version, which he envisaged hanging in large numbers from trees in the Gardens. The idea highlighted Konkylie’s sculptural art light qualities, and with Tivoli’s pre-order of 60-plus in hand, Lyfa became interested in putting the metallic version onto the general market. 
Brødrene Bjerg factory (who had in fact produced Simon P Henningsen’s Divan 2 lamp), and shortly afterwards he was able to present Lyfa with a finished copy of the lamp. So as with the Divan 2, Brødrene Berg ended up making the Konkylie on behalf of Lyfa.
(one of which had a blues-and-red interior and the other a white interior), and a monochrome version in light grey.
because it was rather expensive to produce and Lyfa used it as a “prestige light” – as they did with other lights by Simon Henningsen and Louis Weisdorf – to promote sales of the company’s more traditional fixtures. A slightly modified version of the Konkylie was produced for a Japanese Tivoli park in 1996. 
