Hans Bergström

Bergström was born on 4 November 1910 in Karlshamn, Sweden. After finishing secondary school in 1927 he took an internship at Ystad Metall, a local craft industry near his grandfather's farm, and in 1929 enrolled at the School of Art and Design in Stockholm. Before graduating, at the age of twenty, he was already designing for Ystad Metall at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. He had met his future wife Verna in the 1920s, during the summer holidays in his native Karlshamn, and in 1934 the two founded ateljé Lyktan together, a venture that combined luminaire design with their other artistic work.

At the start of the 1950s plastic caught his attention as a new material for modern lighting. As the United States began to take the material seriously, Bergström came across a method of spraying plastic onto a rotating wire frame with a spray gun, a technique not unlike the approach Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni would later use for their cocoon-like Viscontea lamp (1960) for Flos. He recognised the potential and secured a patent for the production process. From that point on he led a revolution in Swedish luminaire manufacturing that reshaped how electric light was understood and used in the decades that followed.