The most beautiful innovations of the Light Show, small concerns and big questions.

Tentatively poetic by day, powerfully sublime in the evening. A large number of the innovations at this year's Light + Building are elegant, almost royal, one might think. Here are the highlights of the new luminaire design.

There is a mood of progress in the air, gone are the days of uncertainty. While quite a few manufacturers were noticeably awkward on the subject of LEDs just a few years ago, they are achieving a common goal during this year's lighting fair in Frankfurt: to transform the luminaire from a decorative lighting instrument into an impressive medium for an indispensable element - light. At the same time, light does not simply remain light - the luminaires must shine even when they are switched off. Contemporary luminaire design wants either to set accents or to be emphatically restrained. Or as designer Arik Levy puts it at the Vibia booth, "The question is how we link architecture with itself."

As the possibilities grow, so do the demands, and with them the race for the perfect light. As if electric light had just been reinvented - which is somehow true. Depending on individual needs, color temperatures can be infinitely adjusted today: Occhio. Color spectra invisible to the human eye help plants grow: Artemide. Glass bodies not only envelop the light source, but also transport the light: Stefan Diez for Vibia. Or track systems circulate sculpturally in a circle: Buschfeld and Delta Light. There are also new wireless luminaires: Nimbus and Tobias Grau.

Most designers now know how to use the potential of compact LEDs. Even if, at first glance, numerous repetitions can be discovered in the form of light rings, light rods and swiveling light discs. For consumers, this opens up a new playing field - and the question to themselves of what light actually has to be able to do. Probably for the last time, unsettled customers will only be offered the standard E27 base as an option in isolated cases. And then?

Remains a problem, for which there is still need for clarification: What happens to the luminaires when the service life of the integrated LED unit is over? Dispose of the luminaire completely? Probably not. Send it in? Replace the bulb yourself? Louis Poulsen, for example, offers the latter option - how else are classics to be created? Many other manufacturers still have to answer this question. The Czech glass luminaire manufacturer Brokis, on the other hand, offers its own maintenance service; in the future, it will even be possible to replace entire luminaire models in the contract sector - which makes perfect sense in regularly varying interiors. The future of light, it seems, will be based on changeability, individuality and the creation of new spatial experiences. The most beautiful fair novelties on the way there you find here in our picture gallery...

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