What Paper Does to Light
On the last Sunday of October the clocks go back, and the evening arrives an hour earlier. For the next five months the evenings belong to lamps rather than to the sky. It is around now that the question of how a room is lit stops being theoretical. Overhead light that seemed fine in September begins to feel flat and slightly accusatory, and people who never thought about lampshades find themselves standing under one, looking up.
A surprising number of them end up choosing paper. It is an unlikely material for the job. Paper tears, yellows and cannot be washed. And yet the paper lantern has outlasted most of the lighting technologies it has been asked to work with, from the candle to the incandescent bulb to the LED, and it keeps returning in new shapes. The reason has less to do with fashion than with what paper does to light.
A bare bulb is a small, intense point. Look at it and the eye contracts; place it above a table and every object casts a hard shadow. A sheet of thin paper placed around that point changes the arithmetic. Its fibres scatter the light in every direction, so that the lamp no longer reads as a point but as a glowing surface many times larger. The brightness is spread over that surface, the glare falls away, and shadows soften at the edges. It is the same problem that Poul Henningsen solved with layered metal shades, as this journal described in the story of his Piano lamp. Paper arrives at a similar result with far less engineering and far less weight.
The form most people picture comes from Japan, and more precisely from Gifu, a city in central Honshu with a long tradition of paper lanterns. Records of Gifu lanterns go back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when they were presented as gifts to the ruling Owari domain. The region had what the craft required: bamboo for the frames and, nearby in Mino, a papermaking culture of great age. Washi, the traditional Japanese paper, is made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry, whose long fibres give a sheet that is thin and translucent yet surprisingly strong. In November 2014 UNESCO added the handmade papermaking of Mino, together with two other Japanese washi traditions, to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The construction has hardly changed. Thin strips of bamboo are wound in a spiral or set as rings around a wooden form. Paper is pasted onto the ribs in narrow panels, and once the glue has dried the form is taken apart and removed from inside. What remains is a shell with almost no structure of its own, which can be folded flat along its ribs and opened out again. That is why a large paper lantern weighs very little and why, hanging in a room, it seems to float.
In the spring of 1951 the sculptor Isamu Noguchi stopped in Gifu on his way to Hiroshima. He watched cormorant fishing at night on the Nagara River, where each boat is lit by a lantern and a fire basket, and the mayor of Gifu asked him to help the local lantern trade, which had been in decline since before the war. Noguchi made one decisive change. He replaced the candle with an electric bulb, and with it the lantern moved from the festival into the home. He called the new lamps Akari, a Japanese word for light that also carries a sense of lightness, and he preferred to call them light sculptures rather than lamps. By the time of his death in 1988 he had designed more than two hundred of them. They are still made by hand in Gifu by Ozeki, a lantern maker working in the city since 1891.
Noguchi's lamps became so familiar that the paper shade has since been treated almost as a generic object, something closer to a light bulb than to a design. That familiarity is part of its appeal. A round paper pendant does not announce itself. It fits in a student room as easily as in a house by an architect, and it ages without embarrassment. The thirty five houses gathered in Living in a Japanese House show how much of that quiet sensibility survives in contemporary Japanese architecture.
The Paper Shade by HAY takes the traditional construction, lightweight paper on a ribbed bamboo frame, and treats it as a family of shapes rather than a single icon. Alongside the round shade in three sizes there are an ellipse, an oblong, a donut and a cube, and more recently a faceted Diamond and a tall Prism that stands more than a metre high. Each shape changes the light in a small way. A sphere spreads it evenly in all directions; the Diamond, wider at the middle, throws more of it sideways; the Cube has flat faces that glow almost like a window with a blind drawn across it.
Paper light was never meant only to hang. In the Edo period the most common indoor lamp in Japan was the andon, a frame of wood or bamboo lined with paper around a small flame, and many andon stood on the floor or on furniture, keeping their light close to the people using it. The Paper Shade Prism Table/Floor returns to that position. It rests on slender wire feet and can sit on a sideboard, a bench or directly on the floor, which puts the glow at the height of a seated person rather than above their head. In the evening that difference matters more than any question of style. Light from below and beside makes a room feel smaller in the best sense, gathered around a few bright places instead of evenly exposed.
Not every paper lamp is made of paper. The Paper Cube, designed in 2021 by the Dutch designer Bertjan Pot, borrows its construction from folded paper ornaments: a flat sheet that becomes a closed volume. Pot, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 1998 and works from a studio in Rotterdam, chose a material that looks like Japanese paper but is made from recycled PET bottles, which makes the shade more durable than paper. It arrives flat in its box and stands on thin beech legs, as a table lamp or as a floor lamp. The principle has not changed: a thin, translucent skin around a light source, enlarging it into something the eye can rest on.
There is something modest in the way these lamps work. They do not add much light to a room; they change its quality. A paper shade lit in the late afternoon of an October day does not compete with the last daylight in the window. It holds a little of it, warmer and closer, and keeps holding it after the window has gone dark.
Images: Courtesy of HAY
