Troika's fresnel-lens chandeliers bend light into geometry for the RSA

Two lights for the RSA's London home that work as compelling decorative elements for the surrounding spaces while still providing the necessary illumination levels.

The chandeliers take their inspiration from early Enlightenment scientists and Troika's fascination with optical phenomena: fresnel lenses bend the light of high-power LEDs into precise geometrical patterns projected onto the ceiling, so the fixtures are simultaneously decoration and the room's light source.

Unveiled at the RSA's reopened London home in August 2012, the chandeliers were read as built form of the RSA's 21st-century-enlightenment mission; Design Indaba covered the unveiling and featured Troika's conference talk the same month.

The Royal Society of Arts was reopening its newly refurbished London home, and commissioned Troika — the London-based, multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel — to design two chandeliers for the spaces.

Troika's concept reaches back to the early Enlightenment scientists: rather than decorating with light, the chandeliers manipulate the very substance of light itself, continuing the studio's fascination with optical phenomena. Fresnel lenses shape the light generated by high-power LEDs into geometrical patterns projected onto the ceiling.

The fixtures had to do real work as well as carry the idea — contributing compelling decorative elements to the surrounding spaces while providing the necessary illumination levels — and they mirror the RSA's own commitment to 21st century enlightenment: an 18th-century scientific instrument logic lighting a 21st-century institution.

The technology is the ornament: fresnel lenses make physics visible, so the chandeliers need no added decoration to signify.

Enlightenment optics for the Royal Society of Arts is a meaning fit — the reference and the client share one intellectual history.

Solving the dual brief of decoration and illumination with one mechanism shows the idea was engineered, not sketched.

Make the medium the message: a society devoted to enlightenment gets fixtures that do not decorate with light but demonstrate its physics.

The two chandeliers went on show when the RSA opened its refurbished London home in August 2012. Troika discussed the work and their broader practice in a Design Indaba conference talk that September.