MSCL CUBELIGHT: How Stacked Glass Cubes Become a Table Lamp

Most table lamps put light behind a shade. Mathias Schifferdecker's CUBELIGHT for TECNOLUMEN does the opposite: the light sits in a steel base and the glass above it is the lamp. This piece looks at how the stacked glass cubes work, what the two versions offer, and what it is like to have 7.1 kg of solid glass and steel on a desk.

A lamp built from glass blocks

The MSCL 1 + 2 CUBELIGHT Table Lamp was introduced by TECNOLUMEN in 2012. Its starting point is the Bauhaus fascination with elementary geometry: the cube, the grid, the module. Schifferdecker reduced a lamp to those three ideas and then handed the final step to the owner.

The construction is simple to describe. A brushed stainless-steel base conceals an integrated LED. On top of it sit eighteen solid glass cubes, each with a 50 mm edge. They are clear, with blue, red, yellow and green accents among them, and they are not fixed to the base or to each other. They simply rest in place, so any arrangement you build is temporary. The overall outline measures 150 x 150 x 150 mm, which means three cube edges span the full width of the lamp.

Because nothing is glued or clipped, the lamp you own on Sunday need not be the lamp you owned on Friday. A tidy, compact block reads as a piece of architecture; a looser, stepped stack reads more like a small skyline. Both are correct. There is no reference layout to return to, and every owner's lamp ends up slightly different.

How the light moves through stacked glass

With a shade, you see a glowing surface. With the CUBELIGHT, you see light travelling. It enters the lowest cubes from the base and passes upward through the stack, and at every joint between two blocks it refracts. Edges catch it, faces carry it, and the coloured cubes tint small areas of the structure without colouring the whole lamp.

The effect depends entirely on the arrangement. Cubes stacked directly above one another make a bright, continuous column. Offset them and the light breaks into separate glowing blocks, each with its own edges picked up in light. This is why the lamp reads as an illuminated city at close range: a cluster of small volumes, some bright, some quieter, with the joints drawn as lines of light.

The specification of the MSCL 1 + 2 lists an integrated LED of 6.8 W and 800 lm at 2700 K, a warm white. In practice that makes it an atmosphere light. It glows rather than floods, and it is at its best in a room where other sources handle the practical work.

What 7.1 kg in a 150 mm cube feels like

The number that surprises people is the weight. The MSCL 1 + 2 weighs 7.1 kg, yet its footprint is only 150 by 150 mm, about the area of a small side plate. Pick it up and the density is immediately obvious: it feels closer to a block of stone than to a lamp.

That weight has practical consequences, most of them good.

• It stays where you put it. A cable pulled by accident, a sleeve brushing past on a hallway console, a cat investigating a bookshelf: the base does not slide or tip the way a light lamp does.
• It needs a solid surface. A sturdy desk, sideboard or shelf is ideal. A thin floating shelf or a flimsy side table is the wrong place for this much glass concentrated in so small an area.
• Move it in two stages. When relocating the lamp, lift the cubes off first and carry the base separately. The loose construction makes this easy, and it is kinder to both the glass and your wrists.
• Handle the cubes as solid glass. They are polished blocks, not thin-walled vessels, but they will still chip if knocked together hard. Rearrange them by setting each one down rather than sliding it across its neighbours.

On a desk, the compact outline is an advantage. At 150 by 150 mm it can sit beside a monitor or at the back corner of a work surface without crowding anything. The weight gives it a presence that its size alone would not: it looks small and feels permanent.

CUBELIGHT move: the cube as the switch

In 2020 Schifferdecker and TECNOLUMEN released the MSCL 3 + 4 CUBELIGHT move Table Lamp, which keeps the 150 x 150 x 150 mm outline and the 50 mm glass cubes on a stainless-steel base with an integrated LED, and adds one quietly radical idea. One of the cubes is the control.

There is no switch, dial or app. The control cube works by wireless radio: you tilt it to dim the light and rotate it to shift the colour temperature between a warm 2700 K and a crisp 6500 K daylight tone. Operating the lamp feels like playing with a building block, which is exactly what the original design always invited you to do. The move version simply makes that gesture functional.

The adjustable colour temperature changes the lamp's role. Cool and bright, it can keep you company at a desk during the day. Warm and dimmed, it becomes evening atmosphere on a sideboard or bedside table. In a smaller home, where one lamp often has to cover several jobs, that range is genuinely useful. Each example is made in Germany and, like the original, numbered consecutively.

Where CUBELIGHT sits in the TECNOLUMEN catalogue

TECNOLUMEN of Bremen is best known for faithful re-editions of Bauhaus classics, above all Wilhelm Wagenfeld's glass and metal table lamp, the WG 24 (its story is told in our piece on the WG 24 and the Bauhaus metal workshop). Alongside those re-editions, the company commissions contemporary designs that carry the same principles forward. The CUBELIGHT is one of them, and the consecutive numbering of every example follows the workshop tradition that runs through the whole range.

A useful companion piece for understanding that thread is the SL 30, a Sabbath candlestick shown in the Werkbund journal "Die Form" in 1930 as an example of good form for ritual objects. Its designer is unknown; it was made by the L. Wolpert workshop in Frankfurt. Its shaft is built like the Wagenfeld glass lamp, with a nickel-plated tube running inside a glass tube above a white marble base, and it stands 338 mm tall. TECNOLUMEN still produces it from the original. Set it near a CUBELIGHT and the family resemblance is clear: glass, metal and stone, each used honestly, each construction left visible.

Choosing and placing a CUBELIGHT

The two versions share their size, their glass and their construction. The choice comes down to how you want to use the light.

• Choose the MSCL 1 + 2 if the lamp is mainly an evening object: a warm, fixed glow on a sideboard, a hallway console or a bookshelf, where its coloured accents and the play of light through the stack are the point.
• Choose the MSCL 3 + 4 move if the lamp has to work across the day, moving from cooler light at a desk to warm, dimmed light in the evening, controlled by the cube itself.

For either one, place it where it is seen at close range. The detail of the CUBELIGHT lives in the joints and edges of the glass, which disappear on a high shelf or across a large room. Eye level when seated is ideal. Keep the background calm, too: a plain wall or wood surface lets the refractions read clearly.

Finally, leave room for your hands. The lamp is designed to be rearranged, and it is most rewarding when the cubes get moved now and then. To see the CUBELIGHT alongside Bauhaus re-editions and Danish classics, browse our Table Lamps collection.