Simon P. Henningsen Biography
Simon P. Henningsen was born in 1920 and spent his childhood in an exceptional home that housed the cultural elite of the time. From an early age, his father devoted himself to meticulous experiments on the diffusion and shading of light in a lighting laboratory located in the attic. In 1925, at the Paris International Exhibition, Simon was just five years old when his father, Poul Henningsen, presented his first revolutionary light production, marking a turning point in his career.
Over the next 40 years, Poul Henningsen's lamp designs became so deeply rooted in Danish culture that they took on their own collective name: PH-lamps. Therefore, when Simon P. Henningsen created his first lamp in 1954 and presented it to the press, it was inevitably nicknamed the SH lamp.
Simon studied architecture during the war and, like his father, never completed his university studies as he immediately immersed himself in practical work and experiments. During the war years, young Simon assisted his father in creating a shell-shaped stage structure in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. In 1945, father and son worked together on the reconstruction of Tivoli Glassalen, which had been bombed. During this time, Simon fell in love with the atmosphere of this thriving amusement park and applied to become the architect of Tivoli when he was offered the opportunity in 1948. He got the job and for the next 25 years, the distinctive aesthetic of Tivoli became fertile ground for his experiments in the field of design.
His position allowed him to have a global vision of the visual aspects of the garden, including the layout, buildings, structures, restaurants, shops and, last but not least, the lighting, for which he immediately prohibited the use of fluorescent tubes. Although Simon's influence led to a radical change in Tivoli's style towards modern design in the following decades, his work was not enthusiastically received by the Danish architectural community, who regarded Tivoli as a theater, not as a tangible reality .
However, for Simon Henningsen, Tivoli was exactly the kind of playground that would inspire his unconventional creations for which he is remembered today.
