Robert Dudley Best

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Bestlite lamp in a living room

Robert Dudley Best (* 1892 in Birmingham ; † 1984 ) was a British industrial designer who designed the renowned "Bestlite" lighting collection at the beginning of his designer career .

Life

Robert Dudley Best was the youngest offspring and heir to the lighting manufacturer "Best & Lloyd". This was founded by his family in 1840 and was one of the largest lighting manufacturers in the world at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the company's history, which began with the production of incandescent lamps , Best felt that the lamp design that the factory produced was out of date.

In 1925, Robert Best attended the World's Fair for Modern Design in Paris . Many of the exhibited designs were heavily influenced by the Bauhaus and Robert Best was particularly impressed by the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe . Inspired by what he had seen, Best began studying industrial design and interior design in Paris and at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts . Inspired by the creative influence of the Bauhaus , Robert Best designed a table lamp during his studies around 1928/1929, puristic in its shape and extremely flexible in its construction. Back in England in 1930, Robert Best put the so-called "Bestlite" (BL1) into production in his family business. The first lights were sold to auto repair shops and the Royal Air Force , where they were valued for their functionality. Only a few found their way onto the desks of some visionary architects .

It was only after the “Bestlite” was mentioned in the then well-known architecture magazine “Architects' Journal” in 1932 that the specialist readership became aware of the lamp's potential. Best achieved final recognition and fame with the desk lamp after Winston Churchill placed it on his desk in Whitehall . Until the late 1930s, Robert Dudley Best expanded the "Bestlite" lamp into an extensive collection of table, floor, wall and pendant lamps. The lights quickly became part of factory and office equipment. The English were proud of the “Bestlite” and from then on they were found in Buckingham Palace , Downing Street and in luxury trains such as the Orient Express or the Pullman wagon , and are still considered the first Bauhaus design made in England.

Robert Dudley Best, as a person advocating better arts education for industrial apprentices, was an apostle to the method of therapist Frederick Matthias Alexander with his Alexander Technique , and was one of the founders of the left British Common Wealth Party in 1942. His social Circles comprised a group of Birmingham artists and intellectuals, including the economist Philip Sargant Florence (1890-1982) and related personalities from the University of Birmingham . He made friends with the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner during his stay in Birmingham between 1934 and 1935 and hosted the first visit of Walter Gropius to England in 1935 after his departure from Germany.

After Robert Dudley Best had produced his extensive series of lights for years in his own factory in Birmingham, in 2004 the Danish design distributor Gubi took over the international production and distribution rights for the "Bestlite" collection.

The "Bestlite", which is inextricably linked to his name, is part of the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Design Museum in London.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Best & Lloyd history (English)
  2. ↑ "Bestlite" only celebrated its comeback in the 1990s when the Danish designer Gubi Olsen (* 1947), founder of Gubi A / S in 1967, strolled through the center of Copenhagen and discovered an interesting lamp in a shoe shop. at madeindesign.de, accessed on June 8, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Best, Robert Dudley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British designer and lighting manufacturer
DATE OF BIRTH 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham
DATE OF DEATH 1984