PH 5

Why it is renowned

The PH 5 is the most popular of Poul Henningsen's lamps, and Nordiska museet in Stockholm holds a cut-away PH 5 that was used at Konstfack to teach interior architects how its shades spread the light.¹ Henningsen's many-shaded lamps began with a gold medal at the Paris exhibition of 1925,² and his PH table lamp of 1927 is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.³

The story

Henningsen spent his career on glare-free light: his lamps reflect and screen the light of the bulb so that none of it reaches the eye directly.² In 1926 and 1927 he turned his early designs into a three-shade system.² He made the PH 5 in 1958 to take any bulb as their shapes and sizes kept changing; the PH Artichoke followed the same year.⁴⁵ Four outer shades send the light down and out, and two small red and blue shades inside warmed the light and helped it render colour; later versions dropped them.¹⁴ Louis Poulsen, with which he worked all his life, makes it.²

What to know it by

• PH 51958Poul HenningsenPendant
• PH Artichoke1958Poul HenningsenPendant of the same year
• Paris lamp1925Poul HenningsenGold medal in Paris