Rising, Dancing, Twisting
Image courtesy of Mathmos.
In June 2023, I was invited to catch a train to Poole, southwest England, as part of a press trip to the Mathmos lava lamp factory. I can’t tell you how pleased I was. I like lava; I like lamps. I like lava lamps. I had never been to Poole, but imagined I’d probably like that too.
As the train started to pull out of London Waterloo, I had it all mapped out. I imagined an altogether lovely day on the English south coast, peering into bottles full of inscrutable liquids. I imagined bubbles of molten, illuminated wax ballooning, trembling and collapsing before my eyes. I imagined forgetting that these lamps run hot, and mildly burning myself while performing essential journalistic investigations. I imagined telling everyone who would listen that I actually already own a lava lamp, given to me one Christmas by my Aunt Sally and Uncle Graham, but that I’d irretrievably bleached its internal liquor by leaving it in direct sunlight. I imagined recounting this anecdote over and over again, forging an unbreakable chain of human connection with the staff of Mathmos, link by tedious link. Reader, all of this happened, but so too did something else. I discovered a mystery.
Inside the Mathmos lava lamp factory in Poole, UK (image courtesy of Mathmos).
For 60 years, Mathmos has manufactured Astro, the world’s first lava lamp. “Not many things have been made in Britain for 60 years,” reflects Cressida Granger, the company’s managing director, as she leads a tour around the factory. For those not lucky enough to have visited Poole (which does seem a nice place – I saw a lot of intrepid windsurfers and jaunty boats), I’m pleased to report that the Mathmos factory is exactly what you would imagine: a mad soda pop factory, filled with industrial nozzles spraying wax and mysterious fluids into crates of clanking bottles. “I’ve got to be quite basic about it because, obviously, it’s a secret,” begins Alan Staton, Mathmos’s master mixologist, as he swings a crate into position beneath said nozzles, “but we call it the master fluid.”
Now, as much as I would like to know what master fluid is, that’s not the mystery I’m talking about. Mathmos may be cagey about the precise composition of its lava and liquid, but it’s not that cagey. After all, a company spokesperson has gone on record with The Guardian to confirm that the ingredients of a lava lamp are pretty basic: “fundamentally, coloured wax in coloured water”. But even if the wax and liquid aren’t especially mysterious, they are quite magical, especially when you see them in action in the showroom adjoining the factory. At the risk of repeating myself, the Mathmos showroom is exactly what you would imagine: a dark space lined with lamps glowing blobby-beautiful amidst the gloom. “With lava lamps it’s all about the bottle,” Granger explains, as spheres of amber, red, blue and green trip lazily around her. “If you tool your own bottle, you have to make 20,000 a day because you need to use an automatic bottle plant,” she adds, a ball of yellow ascending behind her ear, a pink globe dropping beneath her shoulder. “We obviously own the mould for Astro because you can’t be messing around with doing a few. You have to commit.” Everything in the space is aglow and fluid.
“The lava lamp does something which, to the best of my knowledge, no other industrial lamp in history does: it thinks through the full implications of how a lightbulb works and then builds that into its design. ”
For those of you who don’t know Astro, you definitely do. Close your eyes and imagine a lava lamp – that’s Astro! Mathmos’s lamp has that familiar cinched metallic base, into which slots a glass bottle brimming with wax and liquid. A halogen bulb rests just underneath that bottle, while a blunt metal cap slips snugly over its neck, such that the interface between the two materials becomes seemingly seamless. For want of a more technical description, it’s as if someone has installed a viewing window in a cocktail shaker, and the martini within is being shaken slowly and globularly. The Mathmos showroom may be full of different lava lamps – rocket-like Telstars, candle-powered Pods, and child-safe Neos[1] – but it’s the Astro that’s front and centre. “It’s our classic,” Granger explains simply.
A confession: I consider the Astro to be a perfect piece of 20th-century industrial design, and I think you should too. This isn’t just nostalgia for my childhood lamp either, but a full-throated endorsement of the sophistication of its design. After all, the lava lamp does something which, to the best of my knowledge, no other industrial lamp in history does: it thinks through the full implications of how a lightbulb works and then builds that into its design. A big claim, admittedly, but please bear with me while I now justify said bigness.
The Astro lava lamp (image courtesy of Mathmos).
The Astro was created in 1963 by Edward Craven Walker, an amateur inventor who based his lamp around a simple engineering principle: when illuminated, a halogen bulb gives off heat as well as light. That may be basic, but Walker’s insight was to make this the central element of his lamp. Or, put differently, despite heating up being one of only two things that a halogen bulb does, Walker stands alone in having noticed the design potential of hotness. When the Astro warms up, the heat generated by its bulb raises temperatures at the bottom of the bottle, slowly melting the wax. As this material melts, it expands, dropping its density below that of the liquid in which it rests, meaning that hotter portions of the wax start to extend upwards in blubbering tendrils, before breaking off into quivering spheres. Suddenly, you have lava. At this point, the elegance of Walker’s design kicks in. The elongated, tapering form of the Astro’s bottle means that the temperature gradient of the liquid drops in correspondence with the ascension of the wax. Once a wax sphere has floated to the top, the liquid is cool enough to contract the material, increasing its density and therefore sending it spiralling back to the base. Here, the inclusion of a metal spring at the very base of the bottle completes the effect (“It’s a heating element, but it also breaks up the surface tension,” Staton explains, “because without that, you haven’t got a lava lamp”) and the falling wax is, after a moment’s delay, reabsorbed jigglingly into the base lava. It’s a complex, ever changing effect, but one determined by considerations of form, materiality, and the nature of its light source – impossible ornament through practical engineering. “It’s really form follows function,” Granger says, “because the bottle is exactly the right shape to make those lava bubbles work.” Like I said, it’s a masterpiece.
Which made me think that writing this essay was going to be easy. The lamp would presumably be included in every major museum collection going, with a huge wealth of curatorial insights about its value and wider cultural resonances that I could draw on. Yet as I clicked through the online catalogues of MoMA, the V&A and the Vitra Design Museum, a creeping realisation began to set in – Astro wasn’t in any of them. I assumed this must be a mistake, but when I couldn’t find reference to it in the London Design Museum’s collection either, I began to panic. If a British design classic was going to be anywhere, wouldn’t it be there? To try and resolve the situation, I texted Johanna Agerman Ross, the Design Museum’s newly appointed chief curator,[3] to ask whether it was possible that Astro really doesn’t feature in its collection. Having only started in the role a month previously (and having been ambushed by text at about 6pm on a Sunday), she didn’t know for sure, but did suggest that lamps like Astro can be difficult to collect, “because you can’t fully understand their function without them being plugged in,” and also flagged up the potential challenges of conserving roiling liquid and wax. Which is all well and good, but the nearby Natural History Museum has successfully conserved hedgehogs, assorted beaks, and bits of old squid that Charles Darwin stuffed into formaldehyde,[4] so a lava lamp can’t be that much of a problem, surely?
A range of Mathmos lava lamps from the 1960s (image courtesy of Mathmos).
While the museums had let me down, I was convinced that the secondary literature would bear up my belief in the Astro’s design significance. Yet as I read through all 240 pages of Lesley Jackson’s The Sixties: Decade of Design Revolution, I couldn’t find a single reference to Walker’s lamp. There were points at which I thought Jackson was heading there, like when she noted that “[of] all the geometric forms that were utilised during the 1960s, it was those based on the circle which had the greatest resonance,” or her observation that “the 1960s was such a fruitful and creative period in the history of lighting”, but the move onto the greatest circle-based 1960s lighting design of them all just never occurred. Elizabeth Wilhide’s Design: The Whole Story proved similarly lava-less, while Mel Byars’s The Design Encyclopaedia restricted itself to a mention of Mathmos having once collaborated with the British designer Michael Marriott. It felt scandalous. Astro is iconic, but few people in serious design criticism seemed to be talking about it.
This, of course, could not stand. Astro was the first piece of name-brand lighting design I’d ever owned, and even if Aunt Sally and Uncle Graham’s gift had ended in pallid disaster, I couldn’t let their uncley/auntly taste stand disrespected in this way. As such, I set out to solve the mystery: why doesn’t the lava lamp get the critical acclaim it deserves?
“It felt scandalous. Astro is iconic, but few people in serious design criticism seemed to be talking about it.”
Down in Poole, 2023 has been busy. Mathmos has experienced an uptick in sales ever since the Covid-19 pandemic (people were stuck at home: they wanted things to stare at), as well as occupying itself with celebrations to mark Astro’s 60th anniversary. In particular, the company has commissioned five figures from across culture to create new editions of the lamp: designers Sabine Marcelis, Studio Job and Camille Walala, as well as photographer Rankin and new wave band Duran Duran. It’s an eclectic list, but, then, Astro is an eclectic lamp. “It does have a very broad appeal,” confirms Granger, “which is a marketeer’s nightmare.” The lamp’s buyer demographic veers wildly across age groups (although does, Granger adds, skew more male than female) and different audiences respond to different aspects of the design. For some, it’s the lamp’s association with British music from the 1960s and 70s that resonates (Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and David Bowie all owned versions of Astro); others enjoy its sci-fi cachet built up through appearances in shows such as Doctor Who and The Prisoner; while there are various sets of buyers drawn to the lamp’s industrial design, kitsch appeal, or nostalgia. “There are so many different people who like the lamp,” Granger summarises. “It’s kind of a pop product really, but there’s also this design flavour. So, [for the new editions], we wanted to choose people from different walks of life.”
Thing is, what do you do when designing a new take on Astro? The core element of the lamp, its lava, is essentially unchangeable, so you’re already severely limited in the moves you can make. “You can’t change too much or the iconic character disappears,” summarises Job Smeets, the co-founder and art director of Studio Job. “So a project like this is not really about inventing a new principle or adding something to the functionality – it’s about communication.” To Smeets, this kind of communication is important, not least because perceptions of the lamp have changed over the course of its lifespan. “It used to be an industrial product you would see everywhere, from Stanley Kubrick movies to ordinary households,” he explains, “but it has now become quite niche because it’s dependent on the technology and the heat of the light bulb. It’s a bit like other [older] products such as a record player or an alarm clock – they stop being seen as industrial design and become icons instead.”
Image courtesy of Mathmos.
So, what do you do with an icon? Sabine Marcelis, one of Smeets’ fellow designers on the Astro anniversary project, offers one potential answer. “I have to admit,” she tells me over Zoom, “when I first read the brief, I was like, ‘Oh God, this is really restrictive.’” Marcelis had initially hoped to redesign the light’s form, or add multiple colours of wax within a single bottle, but both ideas were quickly ruled out. Although she was familiar with the design from childhood (“I had a friend who had one and I was pretty jealous – I imagined it must have cost about €1m”), Marcelis acknowledges that she had spent little time considering the actual operation of the lamp. “Growing up, I had no idea what the hell it was or how it worked,” she says. “It was only when I started playing around with the ones Mathmos sent where I was like, ‘It’s so simple. It’s genius.’”
As part of its brief, Mathmos set clear limitations around altering the functional operation of the design (and therefore its form), but the challenge of redesigning Astro is actually even more restrictive if you consider one of the central quirks of the design – a quirk which, weirdly, is best illustrated by the early 2000s TV drama Gilmore Girls. In ‘Love and War and Snow’, an episode from the show’s first season, lava lamps get a shoutout when Taylor Doose, a local busybody, gets into an argument with Andrew, who owns the neighbourhood bookshop:
Taylor Well, excuse me, Andrew, but some of us have businesses to run that don’t involve peddling drug paraphernalia to kids.
Andrew It was a lava lamp, Taylor.
Taylor There is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs.
Sci-fi lava lamps from the 1990s (image courtesy of Mathmos).
Child drugging aside, the mention of “use” does tap into something fundamental about Astro: it’s one of the few notable lighting designs that isn’t intended to illuminate anything external to itself. “A lava lamp is a lamp, but its purpose isn’t to light a room,” explains Marcelis. “Its purpose is to light itself and highlight its material properties.” Whereas most lights profess to be functional, the lava lamp doesn’t – at least not in any straightforward way. Since visiting Poole, for example, I’ve set up an Astro in my bedroom[5] and, qua lamp, it’s pretty rubbish. Astro doesn’t give you enough light to read or work by; the light it does emit is distractingly tinted by whatever colour master fluid you opted for; and you have no real control over where the light falls. Like I said, it’s not the best lamp. But criticising Astro by the standards of a conventional lamp misses the point. It’s not there to light a space – it’s there for you to become lost in its waxen whorls. “I sometimes say it has no use, but it actually does have a function,” Granger says. “It’s there to create a mood or a feeling in a space. They’re not serious, but they’re not frivolous either. They’re not utilitarian or useful – their use is for pleasure.” To give credit to Taylor Doose, “There is no use for a lava lamp unless you’re on drugs,” actually captures quite a lot of that sentiment.
This sense that the lava lamp has come to sit unorthodoxly within conventional ideas of lighting is part of the appeal for the design’s fans. “There’s nothing quite like it,” says Anthony Voz, a trained industrial designer who has established himself as both a collector of lava lamps (he estimates that he currently owns around 400, most of which are in storage) and a leading authority on the lamp’s history.[6] “There are millions of designs around the world, beautiful lights like those from [design brands such as] Kartell and Artemide,” he says, “but none of them, none of them, has the appeal and loyal following of the lava lamp.” Voz is passionate about the history of the lamp’s development, but he attributes its popularity to something outside of its engineering. “It uses the element of a light bulb to power it up, but it’s really more than a light – it transcends light,” he tells me. “It’s a lamp, but it’s actually a piece of theatre, it’s a piece of interactivity, it’s a piece of relaxation, it’s a piece of tranquillity. There isn’t anything else out there that has that element of playfulness and interactivity.”
Studio Job’s design added a gold coating to the Astro lamp (image courtesy of Mathmos).
This emphasis on theatricality certainly comes to the fore in both Smeets’ and Marcelis’s Astro redesigns, each of which obscures elements of the lamp’s operation in order to emphasis its visual effect. Smeets has added a gold coating to the top and bottom of his bottle, for example, creating a narrower viewing window which suggests that the lamp’s blood-red lava is emerging from nowhere. “It makes it quite dramatic,” he says, “which is what it should be: a tiny little theatre.” Marcelis, meanwhile, has opted for an all-white lamp with a frosted glass bottle – a haze from behind which neon-yellow lava drifts dreamily into view. According to Mathmos, none of its designs have previously employed a frosted finish; once you’ve seen Marcelis’s in action, you struggle to understand why. The glass’s finish diffuses the light, but also ramps up the sense of mystery, intrigue and downright sci-fi oddness that lava lamps tend to engender in a viewer. “It was a case of zooming in on the one thing that could make it different and maybe more interesting,” Marcelis says. “Everything else I stripped away.”
Paying close attention to a lava lamp’s lava – and, in particular, its contrast to the surrounding design – also highlights one reason why the Astro doesn’t get the critical attention it deserves: it’s an awkward object to make sense of. “The look [of the design] is modernist, right?” explains Smeets. “The form is iconic and there’s this simpleness to the execution of the bottle. It absolutely has a modernist attitude towards developing a product, but it’s not modernist because of that theatrical aspect. You’re getting some kind of magical, hippy [effect], with these almost Henry Moore-like sculptures [appearing in the wax].” He’s right: there’s a stylistic tension in the different elements of the lamp, with its fluid allure chafing against its more traditional design credentials. Rather than noticing the elegance of the Astro’s engineering, your eye is drawn to the visual effect it generates, which in turn encourages the idea that the lamp isn’t so much an industrial product as it is a visual gimmick. The Astro plays with the same rounded, poppy forms that characterised the 1960s work of celebrated designers such as Verner Panton and Vico Magistretti, and it builds out from its light source in a manner that chimes with venerated 20th-century lighting designer Gino Sarfatti’s maxim that “the lighting system is simply a means of support that highlights the characteristics of the lightbulb”. Astro follows a lot of the principles demonstrated by more vaunted designs from the same period, but the use it puts them to is sheer visual delight – a decision that leaves it open to charges of kitschiness and novelty. “When we used to sell to John Lewis [in the 1990s and 2000s], we would always be included in the novelty lighting section,” notes Granger. “We wanted to be with the design, but we’d be put next to the light-up nodding dog instead.”
Sabine Marcelis used frosted glass and neon-yellow lava in her design of the Astro lamp (image courtesy of Sabine Marcelis).
Today, this same suspicion as to whether Astro is actually design, whatever that means, still holds strong. This autumn, for example, I was invited to an industry dinner that was also attended by a buyer for a major design store. Deciding to put my time to good use, I asked for an opinion on lava lamps. Their reply was quick and decisive: “Horrible.” The lamp, they felt, was a 1960s nostalgia act, with no place in a discerning, contemporary home. Yet as I explained my belief in the lamp’s design value (and its place in my discerning, contemporary bedroom) it soon became clear that they didn’t necessarily disagree about the sophistication of the lamp’s design, they just disliked the effect to which it was yoked. The flow of lava, they felt, was too kitsch, too frivolous, too nostalgic and, dare I say it, just too fun to be good design.[7] And if you dislike the lamp’s lava effect, Astro doesn’t have much going for it – in fact, it starts to become objectionable. This, Voz tells me, is not an unusual reaction; actually, it’s part of the reason he began collecting them. “One of the things that was very interesting to me,” he says, “was that here was a product that everyone has an opinion about.”
In researching this essay, the opinion I have come across most frequently is that the lava lamp is a giddy flourish of 1960s design. It’s not an assessment I agree with. For one thing, the Astro is totally 1990s.
“When we used to sell to John Lewis [in the 1990s and 2000s], we would always be included in the novelty lighting section. We wanted to be with the design, but we’d be put next to the light-up nodding dog instead.”
“I picked Mathmos up in 1989,” Granger tells me, recounting how she and her former business partner David Mulley acquired the company (then known as Crestworth Ltd) from Walker and his wife Christine at the end of the decade. Despite having grown up in Poole, she professes never to have come across lava lamps until brought into contact with them as part of her work as an antiques dealer. “When I saw my first one, I just thought it was great,” she says; fortunately, consumers seemed to agree. In the 10 years following Granger and Mulley’s acquisition, Mathmos doubled in size every year, eventually rising to a turnover of around £18m. Anecdotally, I can confirm this. I am a child of the 90s and adverts for Mathmos lava lamps were in all the video game magazines I bought; they filled the windows of The Gadget Shop and all the other 90s stalwarts I saw while pottering around town with my mum; and they were bubblingly present in most of my friends’ bedrooms. Aunts Sally and uncles Graham must have been very generous that decade. “I think it was partly because they had basically disappeared in the 80s,” Granger suggests as to their sudden rise in popularity in the 1990s. “It was pre-internet, so things could just disappear completely. When they came back in the 90s, younger people were seeing them for the first time. They felt very fresh and we definitely sold more lava lamps in the 1990s than we did in the 1960s.”
I don’t think this is surprising. After all, Astro was a good match for the 90s. Its British manufacturing and poppy vibe seemed to gel with the Cool Britannia cultural movement that dominated much of the decade (and which was, in itself, basically a 60s tribute act),[8] while its constantly shifting lava seemed to reflect the emergent aesthetics of digital design and 90s video game culture. It was, I would suggest, a perfect lamp for late-night Playstation, fuelled by all kinds of things Taylor Doose would disapprove of. “[The resurgence] was about the same time as that whole era of inflatable products,” Smeets recalls of his own 90s interactions with the lamp, “so it felt like part of a wider design phenomenon. It has that morphing effect like [a screen saver] on a computer screen, but done in a very analogue way.” As the decade wore on, the lava lamp started to further coalesce with the rise of Y2K aesthetics in design, with their emphasis on flowing, unbroken, futuristic forms. Despite being 30-years-old, and manufactured from low- tech materials and processes (as far as I can tell, the most adventurous technique used in making a lava lamp is metal spinning), Astro seemed to speak to people’s ideas of what the future should look like. “It’s this idea of the future,” Marcelis summarises, “but seen from the past.”
Fluidium lava lamp designed by Ross Lovegrove (image by Rankin, courtesy of Mathmos).
In 2000, this process culminated with one of the company’s most ambitious projects to date: Fluidium. A contemporary take on the lava lamp, Fluidium was the work of industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, who abandoned Astro’s machined metal lines in favour of an injection-moulded polycarbonate body that seemed to itself be flowing. If Astro was space-age in inflection, Fluidium was resolutely cyber, with a sinuous, droplet-like form that seemed to speak to the millennium’s wider techno-optimism. “It was very much of its time,” says Lovegrove, whose design remained in production for 16 years, and is now considered a collector’s item.[9] “You had the Apple iMac at around the same time, and there was this idea of using polymer in an elegant, noble way for its properties – meaning, you know, light transmission and so on.” The result was divisive (one person I spoke to while researching this essay deemed it the greatest of all the lava lamps; another rejected it as “spermy”) and not a commercial success, but Lovegrove’s ambition in searching for a form that would move the lamp on from its 1960s expression was undeniable. “Being asked to design [a lava lamp] means you don’t start from zero, because you already have a compass embedded in you of what that product represents,” Lovegrove explains. “It’s a 60s icon, but I wanted something that was more the mood of the time.”
Personally, I love Fluidium (and if any aunts or uncles are reading this, do please remember that Christmas is coming), not solely because it speaks of a particular moment in design history, but also because it’s a demonstration of the lava lamp’s capacity to shapeshift between different periods – something Lovegrove acknowledges too. “I think it’s the kind of product that can go any way,” he tells me, before drawing a parallel between the lava lamp and the profusion of plasma lights, fibre-optic lamps and other science-inflected novelty designs that had also become prominent in the 90s. “I think all that stuff is really great, it’s just not packaged in the right way,” he adds. “Those products have a kind of magical charm, which I think there should be room for in design.” The challenge, he believes, is in repositioning this kind of ambient, theatrical lighting as worthy of serious design consideration, which is where the flexibility of the lava lamp’s appeal may come into play. “It can go scientific, it can go fun, it can go for children, it can go super popular, it can go hippy, it can go space age,” Lovegrove notes. “We have a tendency [in design] to banalise geometries into ridiculous simplicity, whereas what I like about the lava lamp is that it’s a dialogue. It’s an act of morphogenesis, always.”
“It’s an icon that’s simultaneously 60s and 90s; a design that is both highly engineered and staggeringly kitsch; an aesthetic that’s wholly digital, but entirely analogue; a lamp equally beloved by kids, spaced-out 20-somethings, and nostalgic boomers; a visual gimmick, but also a rigorous display of material properties.”
This may be one reason why the lava lamp tends to be dismissed as being a piece of unserious design. For an object with such a pronounced aesthetic, it’s still something of a blank canvas, absorbing different references at different points in its own timeline. “Despite its simple design, a lava lamp’s contents are as permutable as an alphabet,” wrote poet Nora Claire Miller in her excellent 2023 essay ‘The Language of Lava Lamps’ for The Paris Review, but I actually think the lamp’s design is pretty permutable too. It’s an icon that’s simultaneously 60s and 90s; a design that is both highly engineered and staggeringly kitsch; an aesthetic that’s wholly digital, but entirely analogue;[10] a lamp equally beloved by kids, spaced-out 20-somethings, and nostalgic boomers; a visual gimmick, but also a rigorous display of material properties. Astro takes on a lot of its surrounding culture, for both better and worse, resulting in a whole jumble of contradictions that make for a design that is very hard to place and assess in isolation. Just as Marcelis felt as a child, it’s a design where you constantly wonder what the hell it actually is.
On the train back from Poole, I got to thinking about Edward Craven Walker. With no formal training and no other products of note to his name, he was clearly an unconventional kind of designer. But he does seem to have understood the appeal of his design perfectly. “It’s like the cycle of life,” he said of Astro’s operation. “It grows, breaks up, falls down and then starts all over again.” It’s a good description of the lamp’s wax, but also a description of the design itself. The Astro has twice become indelibly connected with the design culture of a particular decade, before being rejected as an anachronism in the next. The lamp’s heyday in the 60s and 70s was followed by its disappearance in the 80s; its resurgence in the 90s was followed by contraction in the 2000s. “It does come in waves,” Voz agrees. “We had the first era, then we had this massive revival in the 90s. I think we’re seeing a new revival right now.”
Lava lamp inventor Edward Craven (image courtesy of Mathmos).
Well, I certainly hope so, because there’s a lot about the lava lamp that’s excellent. It’s a design that unashamedly marches to the beat of its own drum, but which still follows sound design principles, not least the fact that all of its elements are discrete. As such, if any individual part breaks, it can be straightforwardly replaced as a single component: an emphasis on easy repair that is supported by Mathmos selling spare parts and legislation compliant halogen bulbs for all of its lamps,[11] including for versions of Astro stretching back to the 1960s originals. “The beauty of Mathmos is that you can take a lamp from the 60s, buy a new bottle and it will work seamlessly,” says Voz. “The future of design will be repairability, but that’s already present in Mathmos’s design. If you look at the lava lamp, it’s very minimal, but it was, and still is today, very much ahead of its time.”
All of which I agree with, but I also don’t want to hit too hard, because at least one positive corollary of Astro having been denied so much of the historicising and theorising that goes on within design is that it’s been spared so much of the historicising and theorising that goes on within design: it’s a lamp that doesn’t seem to worry about prevailing design discourse, but which is content to plough its own furrow and put forward sheer pleasure as enough of a justification for something to exist. “Which is why it’s not a design thing,” Smeets tells me. “It’s more of a common thing and for everybody, like a stapler or a lighter. We can talk endlessly about the greatness of the product, but that’s just amongst us. The lava lamp is not in the field of design any more – it’s outside of all that.” So while I’d still like to see Astro in more museums and books, it is nice to think that one reason it may not get the critical acclaim it merits is because, actually, it doesn’t really need it. Astro has already been selling for 60 years and, given its price tag of around £85, it’s fairly accessible to wide audiences – at least by design standards. “It is a democratic design,” Granger tells me, “and it needs to be. It needs to be for everyone, because it’s not this sort of elite thing.” Astro may not be in as many of the critical annals and archives as it should be, but it is in people’s houses.
“Suddenly, I feel like I know what Astro is: it is exactly the design I would expect a naturist accountant to come up with. Strict lines, meticulously engineered and manufactured, but fundamentally letting it all hang out in aid of a good time.”
Still, it would be nice to pin down what Astro actually is, particularly given that so much of its lack of recognition seems to stem from its nebulousness. So, as my train wended its way back north, I checked in on Mathmos’s website for a final time. Clicking through a few links, I came across what I assumed was a typo: a description of Edward Craven Walker as “a naturist”. Assuming a gentle English naturalist, friend to hedgehogs and hedgerows alike, had been gloriously mislabelled, I was quite shocked by what I went on to read. “Aside from inventing the lava lamp and various other patented inventions, he also made underwater naturist films,” the website explained, “and owned a naturist camp in Dorset.” Upon Walker’s death in August 2000, the headline for his obituary in the Los Angeles Times was even blunter: ‘Edward C. Walker; Nudist Invented Lava Lamp’.
“Mr Walker,” Granger tells me when we meet up in London a few weeks later, “was not an easy man to pin down.” Given that she worked closely with Walker and his wife Christine for a number of years, the latter of whom is still involved with Mathmos, I assume she would know. “He was an accountant in a grey suit, but he also invented the lava lamp and made naturist films,” she explains. “It wasn’t easy to fit him into a groove. He was always his own person, which is why the Astro is really of him. It’s not easy to pigeonhole.”
Suddenly, I feel like I know what Astro is: it is exactly the design I would expect a naturist accountant to come up with. Strict lines, meticulously engineered and manufactured, but fundamentally letting it all hang out in aid of a good time. The lava lamp represents careful design, fully in service to raucous, silly fun. And when you’ve got that kind of joie de vivre, who the hell needs critical respectability?
[1] Despite being indelibly connected with children’s bedrooms, most lava lamps aren’t formally certified for safe use for anyone under 14. Neo, developed with designer Jonathan Coles, remedies this thanks to a base that includes fixtures, shatterproof glass, a cooler operating temperature, and a structure that screws together so that the bottle can’t be knocked out of its base.
[2] Walker based his lamp on the work of engineer Donald Dunnet, who held a patent on a “display device using liquid bubbles in another liquid”. While Dunnet deserves credit for the idea behind the lamp, however, it was Walker who introduced industrial design and transformed the idea into a product.
[3] Who also happens to be the director of this publication – I don’t have access to chief curators on tap.
[4] Or something like that. I’m not a man of science; I don’t know the details.
[5] Kinky.
[6] Voz is the driving force behind flowoflava.com, which is the most comprehensive and interesting history of the lamp and its industrial development that I’ve found. I wholeheartedly recommend visiting it.
[7] I don’t think they’d agree with my assessment that the lava lamp is too fun to merit adequate appreciation, but if they want to put their conflicting view forward, they can write their own essay.
[8] One intriguing possibility is that these connections to British culture sometimes count against the lamp critically – at least domestically. “People do have different takes from different countries,” Granger tells me, “and we maybe get more flak in Britain than we do in other countries.” I can’t explain why this would be, although one thought is that the lamp has perhaps been more present in the UK than elsewhere during its boom years – maybe the occasional backlash has, in turn, been stronger too.
[9] Which, personally, I think is a shame, because Fluidium is completely in step with the recent renaissance of Y2K aesthetics. “If you pushed it the right way, it could fly,” Lovegrove says. “It’s of the moment, whereas shiny metal is not.” Preach!
[10] It’s the only lamp I know where you have to actively plan ahead to use it, because the lava can sometimes take up to three hours to warm up. “We live in a world of instant gratification,” Voz says. “If you want music, you can get it. If you want videos, you can get them. The lava lamp makes you disciplined in a way, but it also has an element of attachment because you have to wait for it.”
[11] It has been suggested to me that Astro’s use of halogen bulbs is a failing of the lamp, given that they’re not the most energy efficient means of lighting. Which is probably true, but I do think that a sense of proportion is needed. Lava lamps aren’t conventional lights – they run sporadically – whereas all of the articles I’ve found online attacking their environmental credentials seem to assume that they’re running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as if their owners are living in a perpetual swingers’ party. Occasional use, I would suggest, is not going to set the world on fire.
Words Oli Stratford
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #3. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.