Big Mid-Century Modern Artichoke by Poul Henningsen

The PH Artichoke lamp was born out of a lighting commission Poul Henningsen (1894–1967) received from Danish architects Eva and Nils Koppel to outfit the newly rebuilt Langelinie Pavilion, a Copenhagen restaurant that was bombed during World War II by the Germans with support from Danish collaborators. The original space — situated on the Copenhagen waterfront — dated back to 1902 and was a beloved spot for socializing in the city. The new, modernist 11-story pavilion was completed by the Koppels in 1958.

The objective for Henningsen, a Danish architect, designer and author, was to create a light that was beautiful, whether it was on or off. To do so, he returned to a piece he had tinkered with three decades earlier: the PH Septima, a pendant fixture with seven light shades. He updated his old design for the Koppels by paying homage to the humble, edible globe artichoke. 

Henningsen devised 72 copper “leaves” that he staggered in rows to completely hide the light bulb inside and prevent any harsh glare from materializing. Each of the 12 rows would have six leaves.

The genius of the Artichoke lamp lay in Henningsen’s choice to marry design with material. He was drawn to the gas lamps that illuminated his Danish hometown as a child and yearned to re-create the warmth that we attribute to gas lighting. The Artichoke lamp’s decorative arrangement of bent sheet copper emits a similarly radiant hue when lit from within, lending a healthy glow to the guests in the room. It took Henningsen only three months to finish the design upon receiving the commission.

The initial version of the Artichoke lamp was manufactured by Danish lighting company Louis Poulsen, with which Henningsen began working in 1925. When the fixture was ultimately hung in the Langelinie Pavilion, it was so heavy that it required suspension from steel aircraft cables.

The widely popular Artichoke lamp embodies Henningsen’s core beliefs about lighting. “This lamp is constructed with the most difficult and noble task in mind: lighting in the home,” he said. “The aim is to beautify the home and those who live there.”

This mantra rang true throughout Henningsen’s career, as it also helped define other signature pieces of his, such as the PH5 pendant lamp, PH table lamp and more. Henningsen’s original PH lamp design won first prize for modern lighting at the International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925.

Louis Poulsen continues to produce Henningsen’s floor lamps, sconces and more, and the Artichoke lamp is still available in its original copper as well as other assorted materials.

The name Poul Henningsen is synonymous with the best and most innovative modern Scandinavian lamps and other lighting. The Danish designer created a signature vocabulary of fixtures with tiered and layered shades in sculptural arrangements that are at once naturalistic and geometric. 

Henningsen grew up in a town on the outskirts of Copenhagen and studied architecture at the Technical University of Denmark. He would become a noted art critic, journalist and screenwriter, but his first love was lighting design.

Henningsen’s childhood home was illuminated by oil lamps. When his family switched to electrified lighting, he was alarmed and repelled by the harsh glare cast by an incandescent bulb, and in his late teens he began conducting quasi-scientific experiments to measure which materials and methods best diffused or reflected light to give it a warm brightness. His work came to the attention of the lighting-fixtures firm Louis Poulsen, which sponsored the development of a prototype lamp. The design won a gold medal at the 1925 Paris Expositions Internationales des Arts Decóratifs et Industriels Modernes — from which the term Art Deco derives. The lamp, whose three-part shade is said to be inspired by the arrangement of a dinner plate atop a soup bowl atop a teacup, became the basis for Henningsen’s most successful design, the PH 4/3 desk lamp.

All told, Henningsen would design some 100 lighting fixtures in his career. Some of his most notable creations are hanging lamps, which include the Septima (1929), a pendant composed of seven graduated frosted-glass layers; the Spiral (1942), made of a single ribbon of enameled aluminum; and the Artichoke lamp (1958), whose 70 glass or metal fins in a staggered and graduated arrangement on a central steel frame resemble those of its namesake. The last is likely Henningsen’s masterwork and an icon of mid-20th-century design. Like all Henningsen lighting designs, it is striking, sculptural and — thanks to his insistence on the primacy of the quality of the light cast — superbly functional.

Find a collection of authentic Poul Henningsen table lamps, floor lamps and other lighting on 1stDibs.