Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture by Rio Jiunyu Chen is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 A' Design Award in Lighting Products and Fixtures Design Competition Category.
IronLighting· 2025
Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture
Client: Rio Chen Studio
A' Design Award Winner in Lighting Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #168998The Design
About Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture
Blocks Lamps is a collection of sculptural table lamps inspired by urban architecture. The five forms draw on libraries, towers, townhouses, inverted pyramids and arenas. Each lamp is made of white oak, steel and mulberry paper. Wood grain textures taken from printmaking are transferred onto the shades, recalling the passage of time. When the lamps are placed together, the group resembles a city block and creates an interplay of light and shadow. The collection treats lighting as both a personal and an architectural object.
The Recognition
About the A' Design Award
Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture is an Iron A' Design Award winner, a prestigious recognition granted to good designs that meet the professional and industrial requirements expected from well-designed creations. Iron winners demonstrate great skill, high specialization, expert understanding, and creative capacity of their creators. Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture is expected to be a highly regarded, admired, and cherished creation that is practical and innovative. This Iron A' Design Award-winning design integrates industry best practices and has competent technical characteristics linked with know-how and talent. Blocks Lamps Lighting Fixture is respected for its thoroughness and is designed to provide quality of life improvements that help make the world a better place.
Where to Get It
Sculptural Lighting and Furniture Design
We create architectural lighting and furniture pieces from our Brooklyn studio. Blending woodworking, metal fabrication, and printmaking techniques, we transform urban narratives into functional sculptures. Each design explores materiality, form, and the stories objects carry through space and time.
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Design Interview
What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?
The main principle behind my design is to merge emotional memory with architectural thinking. I draw inspiration from personal experiences—moving between Taiwan, Chicago, and New York—and from the visual language of urban planning and popular culture. My work seeks to create objects that feel both familiar and reflective, grounding users in a sense of place and time. I believe design should tell stories, evoke emotion, and offer thoughtful engagement through material choices, form, and process. That’s where beauty and meaning intersect.
What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?
My main focus in designing the Blocks Lamps was to create a deeply personal yet universally resonant object. I wanted to translate memories of cityscapes into sculptural lighting, using warm materials to evoke comfort and reflection. The goal was to blend emotional storytelling with architectural form.
What are your future plans for this award winning design?
I plan to expand the Blocks Lamp collection by exploring new scales, functions, and materials—possibly venturing into furniture and larger installations. I’m also developing a limited edition that pays tribute to New York City, continuing to evolve the narrative and emotional depth embedded in each piece.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- Blocks features a series of sculptural table lamps that evoke the geometry of city blocks. Each lamp combines minimalist forms with textured surfaces, offering a modular aesthetic inspired by Chen’s experience of constant relocation—from Taiwan to Chicago and New York. The designs capture the tension between permanence and transience, symbolizing how objects and spaces accumulate meaning over time.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Tower Lamp: 120mm x 120mm x 343mm, Library Lamp: 153mm x 280mm x 172mm, Pyramid Lamp: 228mm x 228mm x 178mm, Arena Lamp: 203mm x 203mm x 203mm, House Lamp: 120mm x 120mm x 203mm.
Material: White Oak, steel, and mulberry paper. - Tags
- Architectural Design, Lighting, Lamps, Wood, Blocks
- Production Technology
- The sculptural table lamps take cues from architectural forms, spanning libraries, towers, townhouses, inverted pyramids, and arenas. These shapes transform familiar structures into modular, intimate objects, blurring the line between furniture and urban design. The wood grain textures from Chen’s printmaking technique are integrated into the lamp shades, transferring the organic patterns of wood onto a new material surface. This approach reinforces themes of time, material memory, and transformation within the lighting design.
- Design Challenge
- Inspired by Chen’s personal journey relocating between Taiwan, Chicago, and New York, the collection examines the act of packing, shifting, and reassessing belongings—both physically and emotionally.
Blocks reflects an object-oriented perspective, questioning how we define value, space, and memory in our lives. The work suggests that cubes—whether seen as obstacles, pixels, cities, or cherished objects—shape our perception of place and belonging. - Research
- Blocks is a design-driven research project exploring architecture, material memory, and movement in object design. Inspired by relocation, it examines how urban landscapes and modularity shape emotional connections to objects. Drawing from libraries, towers, and townhouses, the lamps resemble cityscapes with wood grain-imprinted shades that capture time’s passage. The project reimagines lighting as both personal and architectural, bridging design, space, and memory.
- Inspiration
- The sculptural table lamps take cues from libraries, towers, townhouses, inverted pyramids, and arenas, transforming familiar structures into modular lighting pieces. When assembled together, the lamps resemble a city block, creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow that evokes the rhythms of urban environments. The wood grain textures from Chen’s printmaking technique are integrated into the lamp shades, transferring natural patterns onto a new medium and reinforcing the theme of time.
- Project Duration
- The project started at the end of 2024 and was exhibited in Stockholm Furniture Fair Greenhouse Exhibition 2025.
- Operation Flow
- When assembled together, the lamps resemble a city block, creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow that evokes the rhythms of built environments.
- Team Members
- Rio Jiunyu Chen (Me)
- Image Credits
- Image 01 and 02: Studio 57
Image 03: Rio Jiunyu Chen
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