David Chipperfield Design
David Chipperfield Design provides an inside look at how the studio applies architectural thinking to industrial design and discusses its new collaboration with iGuzzini on the Ribeira outdoor lighting family.
For many architects, the ideal luminaire is one you barely notice. “As an architect, normally you don’t want to see any light fittings,” says Dirk Gschwind Managing Director of David Chipperfield Design. “The less, the better.” Light, in this sense, is not conceived as decoration or spectacle, but as something quieter: a tool for shaping atmosphere, proportion, and the experience of space itself.
Yet despite this instinct towards fewer luminaires, David Chipperfield Design continues to produce lighting objects with an unmistakable physical presence – luminaires that occupy a room with precision without overwhelming it. It is a tension that sits at the centre of the studio’s approach to design.
For Paolo Dell’Elce, Head of Design, this way of thinking begins by rejecting the idea of light as an applied layer altogether. “I don’t see light as something you add,” he explains. “Light is a natural phenomenon that you manipulate. You design around light: you try to control it.”
It is a perspective more commonly heard on the architectural side of the discussion rather than in product design, and perhaps that is precisely the point. Unlike many product studios operating independently from architectural practices, David Chipperfield Design exists as an extension of David Chipperfield Architects itself. Together, they work less as separate disciplines than as part of a shared design culture, carrying the same attention to context, materiality, construction, and experience.
During Milan Design Week, the studio presented an exhibition in collaboration with Italian design magazine Casabella, showcasing a concise selection of David Chipperfield’s designs. Titled Cose Disegnate da Architetti, meaning “Things Designed by Architects”, the exhibition brought together furniture and lighting pieces developed by David Chipperfield Design over the last 35 years. Speaking to Dell’Elce at the exhibition, he explains that the core of the installation was to highlight Chipperfield’s distinct “architectonic” approach to industrial design – one that foregrounds structure, tectonics, and the broader architectural background.
“These objects were conceived from an architectural perspective, not as pure industrial design,” explains Dell’Elce. “Most of these things were designed in connection to a project, so we’re always thinking about the larger scale.”
The distinction is subtle but important. While David Chipperfield Design produces furniture, lighting, and domestic objects, the studio does not approach them as isolated products or exercises in styling. Instead, they emerge from the same methodology that underpins the architectural practice itself, one grounded in context and an understanding of how people inhabit or move through a space.
That relationship between architecture and product design is not theoretical either; it’s embedded in the structures of the studio. “Both Gschwind and I, and the people working at David Chipperfield Design, all work at David Chipperfield Architects too,” says Dell’Elce. “It’s not that we are a separate unit.”
Some members of the team come from architectural backgrounds, others may descend from interior design, and some, of course, from industrial, but the exchange between disciplines remains constant. Gschwind himself started working at the company as an architect for David Chipperfield Architects, long before overseeing David Chipperfield Design. He describes the influence of David Chipperfield less as a rigid house style than a shared way of thinking: “You work together for a long time and, of course, you are influenced,” he says. “Not that you think like David Chipperfield, but there’s a common understanding we must share.”
That shared understanding always begins with context. Whether that’s designing a museum, a chair, or a luminaire, the process starts not with form but with observation and research. In architecture, this means understanding of the city, the public realms or the historical relevance of the building’s surroundings. In product design, the scale changes, but the principles should remain similar. Dell’Elce describes a process rooted equally in behaviour and use – studying how objects are handled, approached and touched during day-to-day life. “We start from the user perspective,” he explains.
Together, these perspectives form the hybrid identity of David Chipperfield Design. Gschwind reiterates throughout the conversation about the architect’s wider social responsibility, the idea that buildings and objects exist not only for the client but within a larger public realm and environment. Dell’Elce, meanwhile, brings a sensitivity towards ergonomics and behavioural experience developed through years of product and retail design. The result is neither architecture reduced to furniture, nor industrial design dressed in architectural language. Instead, David Chipperfield Design’s objects occupy a space somewhere between the two – designed through architectural thinking and refined through the intimacy of use.
That overlap becomes especially visible in the studio’s latest collaboration with iGuzzini on Ribeira, an outdoor lighting family that translates David Chipperfield Design’s architectural sensibility into an industrial product. Developed over a three-year collaborative process between designers, engineers, and technical specialists, the collection reveals how architectural thinking can shape not only the appearance of a luminaire but the philosophy behind how light itself is understood.
As with all David Chipperfield objects, it was born in tandem with a project. Architects at David Chipperfield Architects’ London studio were working on the Rolex Tower in New York. At the time, iGuzzini had already established a relationship with Rolex and created lighting that met the brand’s highly technical and aesthetic standards. The building demanded a particular circular lighting technology, one that could integrate seamlessly into the architecture and become almost invisible.
Together, they collaborated on creating a bespoke technology that reduces fixture height by distributing the light in a circle, maintaining a high level of performance for Rolex’s showrooms. With the success of this sophisticated lighting technology, iGuzzini wanted to take the technical solution further and develop a new product language in the form of an outdoor lighting series.
For David Chipperfield Design, the proposal also represented a rare opportunity to enter a new territory. “We didn’t yet have much experience in outdoor lighting,” Gschwind admits. “But from a technical perspective, we considered iGuzzini to be one of the strongest companies in Europe, so it felt like the right collaboration to begin exploring that world.” Rather than starting from a purely aesthetic brief, the project evolved from a shared interest in translating an architectural lighting technology into a more refined and emotionally resonant object.
The design began with shaping the entire family of luminaires around the existing technology, extending it across wall-mounted, pole, and ceiling applications. While the engineering already existed, Dell’Elce explains that the real challenge was transforming a highly technical system into something softer and more atmospheric. The original optic relied on multiple LED cells and individual lenses, which produced a dotted appearance common in architectural luminaires.
“We wanted to create a more homogeneous, diffused look,” he explains. To tackle this, the team developed a solution that would be known internally as “the no-dot optic” – a custom optical solution that was inspired by automotive lighting technology, particularly LDL (light transmission technology), taking the same phenomenon and technology used in car optics to create a seamless, more diffused projection of light.
“I think the no-dot optic is one of our greatest contributions as designers”, adds Dell’Elce proudly.
Once the technology had been perfected, the next step was refining the form. The team recognised that most outdoor lamps, while functional, lack the aesthetic refinement, and decided to approach the fixture’s design with the same material quality as an emotional quality object, despite its technical outdoor performance. Gschwind notes that many outdoor luminaires succeed in functionality but remain visually cold or overly infrastructural. Ribeira sought something different: an outdoor fixture with the same restraint and composition of domestic architecture.
This ambition becomes most visible in its domed form. Rather than filling the central cavity with additional technical components, the team deliberately preserved it as a void – a nod to something more architectural than industrial. Light is carefully directed back into this hollow centre, producing a faint internal glow that delivers a sense of depth and calmness. “It should also be like a void,” Gschwind explains. “Part of the form itself.”
However, achieving this balance between refinement and performance was never straightforward. As the project progressed, increasing technical requirements began to reshape the object.
The larger fixtures in particular had to address vandal-resistance and waterproofing standards, which called for structural reinforcement and visible fastening systems that shifted the character of the original concept. As Gschwind noted, this inevitably altered the original vision to some extent. In response, the team worked carefully to find a balanced solution: a larger version adopted the necessary protective detailing for public environments, while smaller fixtures remained more refined to suit hospitality and residential applications.
Ribeira’s form also reveals something fundamental about how David Chipperfield Design approaches lighting. During our conversation, Gschwind revealed that light occupies a strangely paradoxical role in architecture. It is essential for how a space is perceived, yet the source of illumination is expected to be hidden at all costs.
According to Gschwind, luminaires are treated as almost necessary intrusions for many architectural environments – technical devices that must support the space without competing with it. “The less is better,” Gschwind adds. Yet Ribeira is not invisible. Rather than dissolving in the architecture, it occupies a quiet middle ground between luminaire and architectural element.
For Dell’Elce, the issue begins with the language used around light itself: “I don’t see light as an added layer. Light is a natural phenomenon that you can manipulate and control.” This distinction is important; to “add” light suggests something supplementary, as though it is a final gesture applied after the architecture is complete. David Chipperfield Design instead sees light as something inseparable from the architecture and part of the emotional and material constructions of a room from the outset.
This sensitivity towards atmosphere and perception is present throughout the conversation, particularly when discussing In Praise of Shadows, the influential 1933 essay by Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Both Gschwind and Dell’Elce reference the text when describing their understanding of light quality and spatial mood.
In the book, Tanizaki reflects on the shadows of traditional Japanese architecture and how objects transform under different cultural conditions of light. For example, a lacquer bowl glowing softly within a dim interior possesses a fundamentally different emotional quality when removed from that environment and placed beneath the brightness of a modern European room. For Dell’Elce, the text became formative during his design studies; for Gschwind, it remains a reminder that light is never neutral but deeply tied to atmosphere and cultural perception. This reference reveals why David Chipperfield Design is resistant to rigid distinctions between “architectural” lighting and “decorative” lighting. “That is just a commercial separation I don’t embrace,” says Dell’Elce.
While the lighting industry often categorises products according to whether the fitting itself is visible or concealed, David Chipperfield Design’s perspective is less binary. A luminaire may quietly disappear into a ceiling or assert itself more clearly within a room; what matters is whether it contributes meaningfully to the experience of the space. Gschwind points towards hospitality environments, restaurants, and domestic interiors as examples where visible lighting objects can enrich the atmosphere without overwhelming architecture. “It’s not black and white,” he says. “There’s a lot of grey in between.”
That nuanced position perhaps explains why Ribeira feels less like a technical outdoor fitting and more like an architectural object scaled down into product form. The goal was never simply to illuminate space efficiently, but to create an outdoor luminaire with the refinement and emotional softness more commonly associated with interior environments.
Attention to detail also went beyond form and optics, and even to the assembly of the Ribeira. From the outset, both David Chipperfield Design and iGuzzini committed to eliminating adhesives and silicone sealing wherever possible, so that it could be fully disassembled.
“It was one of the main goals from the very beginning. We wanted the fixture to be totally recyclable.” However, avoiding glue-based assembly methods made the process considerably more complex, requiring components to be mechanically resolved rather than permanently sealed together. While the adhesive-free system posed challenges during the development, this complexity could not be compromised for the sake of David Chipperfield Design’s methodology and iGuzzini’s broader marketable expectations. “You cannot compete with entry-level products in that way. Companies like iGuzzini need to differentiate themselves through their approach as there are so many silicone-based optics already out there,” says Dell’Elce.
Like architecture itself, Ribeira was conceived not as a closed object, but as something capable of lasting over time. Components can be ultimately recycled or repaired, an approach that prioritises longevity over concealment.
While the adhesive-free system introduced additional challenges during development, both designers view it as inseparable from the project’s broader ambitions. “It makes everything much easier later, and it extends the lifespan of the product impressively,” says Dell’Elce, referring to maintenance and aftercare.
Sustainability is also critically important to David Chipperfield’s practice. Known for challenging today’s “throwaway” culture, David Chipperfield prioritises environmental responsibility through adaptive reuse and repairing of existing structures and favours long-lasting materials over wasteful rapid construction. However, this radical sustainable stance may come at the cost of a contradiction to its design arm.
Dell’Elce speaks about this tension with honest transparency: “Two do something new is already not sustainable,” he says. “We are designing the next lamp, and no one really needs the next lamp.” Rather than avoiding the contradiction, David Chipperfield Design appears acutely conscious of it. Sustainability, in this sense, is not treated as a marketing layer added at the end of a project, but as an ongoing ethical negotiation embedded within the act of designing itself.
When asked how the studio navigates this paradox, Dell’Elce is careful not to offer easy resolutions. Instead, he describes a practice built on selectivity and self-awareness. David Chipperfield Design chooses carefully when developing products for long-term production, ensuring any addition to the market must offer something meaningful beyond stylistic novelty. In Ribeira’s case, that justification emerged through the development of a range of optical solutions, including both the no-dot optic and more technical “dotted” systems. Rather than privileging a single approach, these complementary technologies provide different light effects, allowing the project to move beyond short-term visual consumption and inform future applications.
Equally as important is the desire to produce objects that can resist disposability altogether. Throughout the interview, both designers repeatedly return to the idea of reparability and longevity, so that users don’t feel the desire to replace them. In this sense, Ribeira was first and foremost created as an object that will be endured over years to come.
Ultimately, what emerges from the conversation between Gschwind and Dell’Elce is not simply a story about a lighting product, but a wider architectural attitude towards design itself. Throughout the discussion, lighting is rarely treated as decoration but as an extension of the architecture itself. Ribeira embodies this by sitting between disciplines: it is both technical yet atmospheric, discreet but physically present. In a sense, David Chipperfield Design’s approach feels less concerned with producing novelty and more concerned with producing products that can be endured over time. This is why the exhibition in Milan, Cose Disegnate da Architetti, resonates so truly because it is not a stylistic label but a way of thinking. For them, lighting is not something to be added to architecture but something architecture shapes.