The late morning sun shines through the big shop window onto Leonid Rath, one of three co-owners of J. I appreciate the ingenuity we now take for granted, the process of creating an elegant piece that contains all the wiring needed for the first hanging light bulbs.īack in Vienna, I walk down the fancy Kärntner Strasse and enter J. It’s about a metre tall and almost as wide. Its brass frame with king’s-gold finish shimmers subtly amidst its hand-cut crystal drapings. I see the chandelier hanging in the Südbahnhotel lobby. The design spread from there to the Südbahnhotel and all over the world, marking a major change in chandelier design. Lobmeyr made the first of his First Electrical chandeliers for Austria’s Imperial Palace. It’s a fitting home for the first electrical chandelier, designed in 1883 through a collaboration between Thomas Edison and Austrian artisanal glassmaker Ludwig Lobmeyr. It’s been a landmark for Austrian culture, for the novel ideas that have spread from this country to influence the world. Fin de siècle writers and artists gathered here its guests included Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Loos. The Südbahnhotel, built in 1882, was long a hotspot for royalty and high society. The rainbow bends over the Semmering mountain pass, and it feels like I’m following it to a treasure at its end - I’m going to get a glimpse of a famous chandelier, J. As I drive to the Südbahnhotel, an hour south of Vienna, Austria, a large rainbow arches over the view that Emperor Franz Joseph I was known to adore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |