Pendant lamp Gangkofner Pisa opal glass

The shade of the slender, carafe or vase-like Pisa is made of mouth-blown three-layered flashed glass (matte-clear-matte). The canopy of black powder-coated steel is variable in height (and therefore its "capacity"). A brass sleeve encloses the black textile cable that runs into this canopy at the top and into the shade at the bottom, which is reinforced with a steel cable to support the weight of the shade. The transparent suspension made of Makrolon® allows easy mounting (and removal) of the umbrella.

Aloys Gangkofner (1920-2003) is one of the most important German glass designers of post-war modernism. In the 1950s, he worked for the glassworks Peill & Putzler and Erco, among others. He felt there were no fixed boundaries between artistic, industrial, and handicraft work and thought of his work as a process of simply realising ideas. It was natural for him to include in his thinking the character of the material: glass.

Mawa Design has reissued some of Gangkofner’s designs in 2018. The luminaires come for the most part true to the original and only slightly modified where technically advantageous. For example, the glass holders are made of translucent and unbreakable Makrolon® now. Such modifications are entirely in the designer’s spirit. While the shaped glass was a “document of thought turned into action” for Gangkofner, he thought of the finished luminaire as an adaptable object of everyday use. These luminaires are unmistakably from the 1950s regarding form, material combination and naming.

Mawa Design was founded in 1977 by Martin Wallroth in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Wallroth initially developed and produced objects for the living area and often played a pioneering role for formative ideas in product design. In the 1980s, he began fruitful collaborations with external designers excelling at bringing product ideas quickly to commercial viability thanks to the company’s flexible structure. While diligently producing the various serial models, Mawa customized a selection of products to different specifications: Luminaires for the master houses at the Bauhaus Dessau, the home of Corbusier, the University of the Arts and the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, the Treptow Crematorium and the Luther House in Wittenberg were among them. And last but not least, museums worldwide present Mawa luminaires, renowned for high-quality materials and unsurpassed technical implementation, as parts of their collections.

Mawa luminaires have always been at the cutting edge of light design while excelling at the technical execution and directing the light with regard to the fancied visual impact. Groundbreaking innovations in the lighting sector, such as the LED filament light bulbs, immediately found their way into the Mawa product cosmos. A decisive factor in the entrepreneurial success of Mawa Design was (and still is) the extraordinary combination of design studio and manufactory. Since 1997, the company has been based in the Palmhof, a renovated and listed historical monument in Langerwisch near Potsdam. Eventually, the manufactory offers enough space for all employees and the creation and production of the numerous in-house designs such as the wall and mirror lamp “Linestra”, the wall and ceiling lamps “Etna” and “Eintopf”, plus lighting classics of other renowned designers such as the pendant lamp “Havanna” designed by Wilhelm Braun-Feldweg or the floor lamp “Schliephacke” named after its creator.