Poul Henningsen, “The House of The Day After Tomorrow” Ceiling Light

Tina Jørstain and Poul Erik Munk Nielsen, eds., Light Years Ahead: The Story of the PH Lamp, Copenhagen, 2000, pp. 295-296

Dansk Møbelkunst, Møbeldesign: PH Lamper 1926-1962, Copenhagen, 2004, pp. 44-45 (for the 1958 version of the Artichoke model)

TF Chan, Louis Poulsen: First House of Light, London, 2024, pp. 56, 270 (for the present model)

Forum Copenhagen, House of the Day After Tomorrow, Copenhagen, Spring 1959

The House of the Day After Tomorrow was an ultramodern home built as an exhibition space in Copenhagen in 1959. Its architect, Ole Helweg, was tasked to imagine the interior of the future and in doing so, created a circular house based off of earlier designs by Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen. Helweg’s overall approach to the design of this experimental space was to eliminate superfluous ornaments and to instead favor advanced materials and design strategies. 

The success of the presentation was in great part due to the contribution of Poul Henningsen, who was asked by Helweg to create new lighting solutions for the space that would fulfill its futuristic concept. In collaboration again with Louis Poulsen, Henningsen created 15 pendants specially for the house, including the present lot, whose design he modeled after his “Artichoke” ceiling light from two years prior. The “Artichoke” was originally designed in 1957 for Copenhagen’s Langelinie Pavilion, an upmarket restaurant and social hub overlooking the city’s harbor. 

The two models share a number of similarities, with both their design made of flat lacquered panels of various sizes opening outward from the light source and evoking a pine cone. Some of the design principles guiding the Langelinie Pavilion’s lights seem to continue to resonate here: functional use in a U-shaped area; resonance with the surrounding architectural style; a “festive and warm glow”; and a design that would be visually appealing, regardless of whether the lights are on or off. 

While similar, significant differences make the present work unique in its own right. For this project, Henningsen used trapezoids of aluminum rotating as a spiral, and horizontally subdivided into three sections using different color paint. The color choices were, as much as every small detail of Poul Henningsen’s work, not the result of a spontaneous inspiration but a carefully planned arrangement. In response to ultraviolet light, as opposed to incandescent light, the colored panels of the pendant replicate the color scale of the ray spectrum. Indeed, Henningsen wrote that "the light of the future can of course be nothing more than a critique of the present. The large variegated lamp, reminiscent of the cone crown in the ‘Langelinie Pavilion’, is a rather unrealistic poem about how the light tube could be if it were not a tube, but a fixture, and if it only emitted ultraviolet light and not also a line spectrum". 

With only 15 examples known to have been made and never serialized thereafter, the present ceiling light from this esteemed commission provides collectors with an exceptional opportunity to acquire one of the rarest pieces of lighting ever produced by Louis Poulsen.