Each lamp in Cappellini’s luminaire seems to be dissolving through its 285mm-diameter glass housing. That’s because Meltdown is intended as a metaphor for Japan’s 2011 nuclear disaster. As the owner of Italian design firm Cappellini, Giulio Cappellini (who discovered the luminaire’s designer, Swede Johan Lindstén) told us: It’s “a meltdown of the glass under the strong radioactive nuclear power.” The globes can be composed linearly or as a purposefully chaotic bunch, in monochrome or an array of six colors. www.cappellini.it
