Space is limited, opportunities are not.

A sequence of three photos shows a moving light in the far back of a room.

We are at the 1931 building exhibition in Berlin.

One minute it's pointed at the desk, in no time at a drawing board, then at a side table.

In addition, according to a contemporary text, the lamp “can be adjusted in height using the cord that gently slides in the swivel arms”.

Because a counterweight is suspended with the lamp head and moves with it.

Your umbrella can be swiveled in all directions.

Another finesse: Thanks to the wall sign, you can hang it up securely at two points and take it with you.

The photos don't reveal any of that.

Especially not that Werner Glasenapp, then 27 years old, designed the lamp.

It is one of those moving living objects whose changeable form is memorable as soon as you perceive it.

Its designer, born in Libau in 1904, studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Dresden from 1925 to 1931, finally as a master student in the metal class.

He designed at least two lights for Kandem, the brand of lighting manufacturer Körting & Mathiesen in Leipzig.

Now the lighting manufacturer Midgard is reissuing it true to the original.

One of them is the swivel light 830, which is now called the K830 wall.

"But you made a serious mistake"

For a long time, the name and work of the designer were not simply forgotten: the lamp was also considered to be a design by the Bauhaus student Heinrich Siegfried Bormann.

As such, it is listed in many design collections to this day.

"But you have a serious mistake in your exhibition," Peter Frank called into the phone.

The founding director of the Design Center Stuttgart, born in 1937, is one of the best experts on post-war design developments in the Federal Republic.

"They show lamps with false information about the originator." The caller was certain that his teacher at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen had designed the pivoting lamp and no one else.

Almost four years ago, the article “Lichtet Euch”, which appeared in this magazine and dealt with “100 years of steerable light” and the exhibition in the Cologne Museum for Applied Arts, said: “The Kandem swivel lamp 830 is said to have been designed by Heinrich Siegfried Bormann The origin of the error was a publication in 1933, in one of the last issues of the magazine "Die Form".

There, Werkbund co-founder Richard LF Schulz wrote about the lighting trends of the time.

Also pictured are three Kandem lights, which the caption says were created “in collaboration with the Bauhaus.”

That is true for two models, but the tubular table lamp (model 943) had nothing to do with the Bauhaus.

Since Bormann worked as an employee in the metal workshop at the Bauhaus and managed their cooperation with Kandem in 1931/32,

employees of the Bauhaus Archive, who published a publication about the metal workshop in 1992, assumed that Bormann was also the designer of the swivel lamp.

But at the same time they emphasized that this was “not documented”.