OE Quasi Pendant: Olafur Eliasson's Geometry in Light

Most pendants hide their light source inside a shade. The OE Quasi Pendant Light does something stranger: it builds an open cage of geometry around a white core and lets you look straight through it. This piece explains how Olafur Eliasson's 2019 design for Louis Poulsen actually works, and what kind of room a 755 mm wide, 46.7 kg fixture needs.

An artist's lamp, not a lighting designer's

Olafur Eliasson is known first as an artist. His work tends to deal with light, perception and the way a viewer's position changes what they see, and he has long been interested in geometry as a tool for that: polyhedra, mirrored forms, patterns that never quite repeat. The name Quasi suggests that direction: ordered structures that look regular from one angle and restless from the next.

Louis Poulsen has a habit of working with people who think about light as a material rather than a commodity. Poul Henningsen spent decades refining shades so that the bulb was never visible, and the result was the layered leaves of the PH Artichoke Pendant Lamp. Eliasson's collaboration with the company, released in 2019, comes from the same instinct but arrives at a very different answer. Instead of hiding the source behind layers, the OE Quasi distributes many small sources around a frame and points them all inward.

Two solids, one inside the other

The structure is easiest to understand as two Platonic solids nested together. The outer frame is a rigid icosahedron: twenty triangular faces meeting at twelve vertices, built in clear lacquered, pickled aluminium. Suspended within it is a dodecahedron in polycarbonate, made of twelve pentagonal faces. In geometry these two shapes are duals of each other, which means the corners of one line up with the faces of the other. That relationship is why the inner form seems to float in the middle of the outer one rather than sitting awkwardly inside it.

The aluminium is the visible skeleton. Its pickled, clear lacquered finish keeps the metal's own grey sheen instead of covering it with paint, so the edges read as fine silver lines against a ceiling. The dodecahedron carries a matt white reflector at the centre of the whole assembly. From below or from the side you see triangles overlapping pentagons, and the pattern changes with every step you take around the lamp.

This is the main thing to understand before choosing it. The OE Quasi has no single front. Walk past it on a staircase or around a dining table and the composition shifts continuously, which is exactly the effect Eliasson was after.

How the light is made

Twelve LEDs are embedded in the frame's inner vertices, one at each corner of the icosahedron. Rather than shining outward into the room, they feed light guides that run along the frame's edges, and that light is directed at the matt white central reflector. The reflector then sends it back out in every direction.

The result is light that arrives spherical and soft, without a hot spot to squint at. Because no LED points at the viewer, the OE Quasi stays comfortable to look at even at eye level, which is unusual for a fixture of this output. It also means the lamp glows as a whole object: the frame catches light along its edges, the reflector reads as a bright core, and the room receives an even wash instead of a cone.

The light source is an integrated 118 W LED, offered in 2700 K or 3000 K. The warmer 2700 K suits homes and evening dining; 3000 K is a little crisper and sits well in galleries, lobbies and spaces with a lot of daylight. Dimming is by Dali or wireless Bluetooth, chosen when you configure the lamp. The LED driver is built into the canopy rather than the body, keeping the geometry clean, and the fixture is rated IP20 for indoor use. It hangs from a 4 m white fabric cord with wire, with the canopy included.

Built to be taken apart

Eliasson's studio has made environmental thinking part of its practice for years, and the OE Quasi carries that into the object. The frame is made from 90% recycled aluminium. Just as important, the lamp is designed for disassembly, so individual parts can be repaired, replaced or recycled at the end of their life rather than the whole fixture being discarded.

For a lamp of this scale, that matters in a practical way too. A pendant that weighs 46.7 kg and hangs at the centre of a room is a long term installation. Knowing that it can be serviced part by part is a good reason to treat it as a permanent piece of the architecture.

Scale, weight and where it belongs

The numbers set the brief. The OE Quasi measures 755 mm wide, 896 mm high and 755 mm long, and weighs 46.7 kg. That is a large fixture by any standard, and the weight is the first thing to plan around. A ceiling point that comfortably carries a standard pendant will not necessarily take this one, so the mounting should be checked by an electrician or structural professional before it goes up.

Visually, it needs air. Because the design is meant to be seen from many angles, it works best where people can move around it and look at it from different heights:

• Over a generous dining table. A long or large round table gives the lamp a clear zone beneath it, and the glare-free light means guests can look up without discomfort.
• In a stairwell. Climbing the stairs gives a view from below, from the side and finally from above, which suits the shifting geometry well.
• In a double-height void or entrance hall. Here the 896 mm height has room to breathe, and the lamp reads as a sculpture from the floor and from the gallery.
• In hospitality and public interiors. Lobbies, restaurants and reception areas with high ceilings give the scale its proper context.

In a room with a standard ceiling height and a small table, the OE Quasi will feel crowded. If your space is more modest but you want a geometric pendant, the Patera Pendant by Øivind Slaatto is a useful comparison. It also builds a sphere from repeated cells, in this case diamond-shaped cells arranged along a Fibonacci spiral, and it comes in four sizes from Ø 300 to Ø 900 mm, with the smallest weighing 4.3 kg. Our piece on how the Patera's Fibonacci shade works explains that design in detail.

Living with the OE Quasi

Day to day, the lamp behaves less like a light fitting and more like a fixed artwork that happens to illuminate the room. Switched off, it is a silver drawing in the air, and the pickled aluminium picks up daylight from windows. Switched on and dimmed low, the white core glows and the edges turn into thin lines of light. At full output it lights a large table or hall evenly, without shadows cut by a shade rim.

Choose 2700 K if the lamp will mostly be used in the evening in a home, and 3000 K if it shares the room with plenty of daylight or with cooler architectural lighting. Pick Dali dimming if the building already runs a lighting control system, and wireless Bluetooth if you want to control it without additional wiring.

Set beside the PH Artichoke, the comparison is instructive. Both are large Louis Poulsen pendants that need room and both refuse to show you a bare light source. Henningsen does it with 72 layered leaves; Eliasson does it with two nested solids and light that travels along edges. If you are weighing several statement fixtures for a big space, you can browse the full range of Pendant Lamps to see the OE Quasi alongside the other sculptural designs.