For some of us, family inheritances I tend to be burdensome, taking up space, emotionally and physically, in both our minds and attics. For the London-based designer and architect Joe Armitage, however, a family heirloom has taken him somewhere lighter and brighter, across generations and continents, and into the path of Le Corbusier. This is the story of a lamp designed by Edward Armitage in India 72 years ago, which has today been expanded into a collection of lights by his grandson Joe.
'My great-grandfather, Joseph Armitage, was a stone carver from Yorkshire, who worked in London from 1910 onwards,' explains Armitage. He made decorative stonework for buildings like the Bank of England and Windsor Castle, and also for Lutyens' parliament buildings in New Delhi. This was the start of the Armitage family bond with India, which would strengthen significantly in the next generation.
Following India's partition in 1947, the Indian government decided to build a new city, Chandigarh, as the Punjabi capital. Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret were commissioned to design a city for the future, and they asked British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew to help them with some of the housing and administrative buildings. 'One day, Fry broke his wrist and was transferred to the nearest hospital, in Ludhiana, where he was asked if he could also design a new hospital for them,' says Armitage. 'Fry replied that he didn't have the capabilities, but he knew someone who could. He called my grandfather, Edward, who was in his twenties at the time. His 21-year-old wife, Marthe, had just given birth to my father, but they moved to India and took on the project. My grandmother is still alive and talks fondly about those two incredible years in India.'
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