Floor Lamp with Sven Markelius “Pythagoras” Fabric Shade — Nordiska Kompaniet (attr.), Sweden, circa 1955–1960

This is a lamp with a story that reaches into the heart of Swedish mid-century design culture — and a visual presence that is immediately and unmistakably of its moment.

The structure is a slender black painted metal floor lamp with a distinctive rounded rectangular base, holding aloft a tall glass cylinder inside which a fabric shade printed with Sven Markelius’s legendary Pythagoras pattern glows with quiet intensity when lit. The effect — geometric triangles in black, grey and white, seen through clear glass, backlit from within — is as graphic and considered as anything produced in Sweden during the 1950s.

The Pythagoras fabric was designed in 1952 by Sven Markelius — one of Sweden’s most celebrated architects, responsible among other things for the Swedish contribution to the United Nations headquarters in New York. Markelius was dissatisfied with commercially available textile patterns and developed Pythagoras himself, working collage-like with paper triangles until he arrived at a composition that paid tribute to the ancient Greek mathematician whose theorem concerns the relationship between the sides of a triangle. The pattern was produced and distributed by Nordiska Kompaniet’s textile department and became one of the defining graphic images of Swedish mid-century design — used primarily for draperies and subsequently imported to the United States by Knoll Associates from 1953 onwards. Finding it as a lamp shade inside a glass cylinder is a genuinely unusual and exciting application of the fabric. The last photo shows a piece of original fabric which is in the collection of Art Institute Chicago, USA.

We believe this lamp was designed by an in-house designer at Nordiska Kompaniet and produced under licence by a local manufacturer — a common practice for NK, who regularly commissioned lamp designs to be produced without specific branding for exclusive sale in their Stockholm store. The lamp bears an inscription “A A B 7” on the base, which we have not been able to conclusively identify but which is consistent with NK’s internal model or batch numbering system of the period.

The lamp is in fantastic condition. The metal frame carries a beautiful patina entirely consistent with its age. The glass cylinder is faultless — no cracks, no chips, no scuff marks. The Pythagoras fabric is fresh and vibrant. The fabric had separated slightly over time and has been carefully reglued to a perfect finish. The pull cord was renewed due to age-related fragility, though the original pull cord end button has been preserved. It takes an E27 light source.

A genuinely rare and historically significant piece of Swedish mid-century design.