Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Throughout the middle ages, churches, chapels and cathedrals were erected across Europe, their vaulted ceilings covered with cobalt and painstakingly decorated with individual golden stars: heaven on earth. The urge to pull the night sky inside persists today, from artist Richard Wright’s 47,000 minimalist stars adorning Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to the London living room of recent HTSI Aesthete and novelist Andrew O’Hagan, which recreates the starry ceiling of a Tuscan basilica. Children’s bedrooms, meanwhile, are made more magical when illuminated by galaxy projectors or constellations of glow-in-the-dark stickers. Now, though, it’s the grown-up design world that is drawing on all things astronomical. Texas- and Philadelphia-based studio Muhly has created a range of punched tin lights titled Lin after Maya Lin’s 2001 artwork Ecliptic – 146 fibre-optic lights set in concrete, recreating the night sky over Grand Rapids, Michigan. In place of the expected Texas stars or equestrian designs, tiny perforations are randomly scattered across Muhly’s table lamps, pendants and sconces (from $975). “With the angle of the shade, it projects really far and wide,” says co-founder Ann Edgerton of the table lamp. She has installed the sconce version in her husband’s reading nook – “it sends soft light down but up above him are the stars”. Currently available in galvanised steel or unlacquered brass, the collection is set to be released in a verdigris finish this year. Alice Palmer has incorporated subtle stars into her new Hundi lanterns (£395). Made from amber, red or bottle-green glass, the fixtures recall turn-of-the-century bell jar lamps, while “the etched star on the glass adds depth with a bit of timeless detail”, says Palmer. “The lanterns are a great way to add a pop of colour into a space whilst creating soft, ambient lighting.”The elusive moon also fascinates. So much so that artist Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon sculpture (seven metres in diameter) has drawn more than 20 million visitors worldwide, who gaze up at the illuminated sphere as it floats in gardens, museums, and cathedrals (it has just arrived in St Albans). At last year’s London Design Festival, Relative Distance debuted Phase (POA), a limited-edition artwork whose waxing and waning is perfectly synchronised with the moon’s real-time orbit. “It’s something that you live with, that changes slowly over time on the calendar scale,” says co-founder Roland Ellis, who drew on the concept of Calm Technology to make the fitting as unobtrusive as possible. Eight thousand LEDs are carefully engineered to emulate natural moonlight and pitch darkness, while a high-resolution composite image from NASA’s 2010 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals the tiniest details of the lunar surface. “It’s a thing that people know, and can get to know again,” says co-founder Dev Joshi. Others take a more impressionistic approach. Davide Groppi’s Moon 120 floor lamp (€3,835) is textured with Japanese washi paper, while Garcé & Dimofski’s Moon Sconce (from £1,420) is hand-moulded in clay by Portuguese artisans. Ludovic Clément d’Armont is a self-proclaimed Semeur d’Étoiles (“star sower”) who creates moons and planets in mouth-blown glass. “I looked at Hubble and other astronomical pictures and spent a year experimenting with how I could produce globes that would evoke these pictures,” he says. “It took a few hundred attempts before I selected the best.” The closely guarded process requires two people, and involves adding crushed marble to melted glass whilst blowing. The resulting lamps are suspended alone (from $1,100) or in cascading chandeliers (from $21,000), while irregular “Météore” table lamps (from $2,900) sit on Space Age-style tripods. Catellani & Smith makes a range of celestially inspired creations, including Bellatrix (£2,860), a golden homage to one of Orion’s brightest stars, and the Alchemie lamp (£3,240), which recreates a solar eclipse. It consists of a brass disc that can be rolled along a limestone base to obscure another disc in glowing alabaster. Anna Karlin also depicts the moon at a fleeting moment: her acrylic Luna Light (from $14,000) is handpainted to achieve the once-per-year pink hue created by what is known as the Rayleigh scattering. As the painters of New York’s Grand Central Station would surely attest, astronomical accuracy has no bearing on beauty (in 1913 a commuter observed that its reproduction of the Uranometria star map was entirely back to front). For his Blue Skies lamp (£1,470), Michael Anastassiades draws on a defunct theory of lunar phases, sometimes attributed to Aristotle, that posits a flat moon, white on one side and black on the other. Anastassiades’ version uses tosa washi paper and hinoki wood for its “moon”, which reflects the light beam from a polished nickel-plated brass base.“The moon is far away – it’s secluded by the atmosphere, buildings, or your life,” says Relative Distance’s Joshi. Simulating the night sky may no longer be a religious pursuit, but a cure for nature-deprived city-dwellers. Or maybe it’s just the latest way to create cosy interiors with sexy, diffused lighting. Either is fine.
