Christian Dell

Christian Dell was a German silversmith who is probably best known for his lamp designs through Gebr. Kaiser & Co. They represent the use of bakelite and plastics in products as early as 1929.
According to the Wikipedia page, Walter Gropius invited him to America after Dell was forced from the Frankfurt art school by the Nazis, but Dell stayed in Germany. Now… Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus school at Weimar before it was shut down by the Nazis. Gropius eventually found himself in America and became the director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design while remaining a practitioner with The Architects’ Collaborative - the first teacher/practitioner to direct the GSD. Suffice it to say that if Gropius asked me to move, I’d start packing. (Ok, ok, granted it was probably difficult to leave Germany at the time.)

But I digress. Look at the lamps!

(Photos from Phillips Depury, Objects in the Loft, and TFTM)

…oh, and look at this modified Dell lamp that I found at the glorious blog, Reference Library.