Here’s a new one from British designer and Fab Green favorite Stuart Haygarth whom I love for his ability to transform castoff objects like plastic wine glasses and plastic containers into high style lighting here and here. This time he’s used old prescription lenses to create an enchanted chandelier called Optical.
The 1.5m diameter chandelier, which contains 3,000 lenses from unwanted eyeglasses, was premiered at the Trash Luxe exhibition at Liberty in London last month.
Haygarth has dabbled with recycled eyeglasses before — as seen in the above 2006 stunner that used both frames and lenses.
According to dezeen, Haygarth gets his lenses from from a charity that ships used spectacles to the developing world. I’m hoping this means these are cast-offs of the cast-offs, otherwise it sounds a little odd to take lenses away from the needy to design a high-end light fixture. Note to self to write the ingenious Haygarth myself.
Note: According to the January 2008 issue of Metropolis Magazine, the glasses were those deemed unusable by the charity.
