also on the topic of connections... allow me to insert a couple paragraphs from an article written by george nelson in 1979.
"We had a modest office and I felt that if I had one of these
big hanging spheres from Sweden, it would show that I was
really with it, a pillar of contemporary design. One day Bonniers,
a swedish import store in New York, announced a sale of these
lamps. I rushed down with one of the guys in the office and found
one shopworn sample with thumbmarks on it and a price of $125.
It is hard to remember what $125 meant in the late forties. You
could buy a brand new Ford convertible for $640, complete with
rumble seat and white wall tires. This automobile, with motor,
lights, gas tank, and wheels, was only five times the cost of this one
lamp. I was furious and was stalking angrily down the stairs when
suddenly an image popped into my mind which seemed to have
nothing to do with anything. It was a picture in the New York Times
some weeks before which showed Liberty ships being mothballed
by having the decks covered with netting and then being sprayed with
a self-webbing plastic, and again, whammo! We rushed back to the
office and made a roughly spherical wire frame; we called various
places until we located the manufacturer of the spiderwebby spray.
By the next night we had a plastic-covered lamp, and when you put a
light in it, it glowed, and it did not cost $125."
-George Nelson on "Peak Experiences and the Creative Act"
at the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1979
(the rest of the article is really great too)
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