Designed by Ferma Studio and ReCraft Design Studio – these lights pair a reclaimed concrete core sample with a lampshade of bacterial cellulose, grown through kombucha fermentation until it turns soft and semi-translucent.
Every building leaves a record in its own substance. Before a structure is altered, tested or signed off, a core is drilled out of it – a cylinder of concrete sent to the lab for testing and discarded once the numbers are read. ReCraft Design Studio, based in Copenhagen, works with discarded construction materials and off-cuts: the material the built environment treats as waste.
Bloom Core and Core Light, shown at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, embrace the beauty of construction waste. For this project, the reclaimed core samples have been used for the lamp bases, where the cylindrical fragments have been left close to how they were recovered – drilled faces, aggregate flecks and all. The extraction has already done the shaping, and the studio’s restraint does the rest.
The lampshade introduces a lab-grown, bio-based material. Ferma Studio, founded by a material designer and a product designer, cultivates bacterial cellulose through a kombucha fermentation process. Dried, the material turns semi-translucent and parchment-like, soft enough to diffuse the bulb into an even, low light. While the concrete carries a sense of weight and history, the light cellulose carries a warm glow.
The unique pairing tells an innovative material story. Together, they hold a conversation between urban remnant and biological growth – two routes to the same idea, that the things usually thrown away or overlooked can be precisely where the value sits.
