studiooberhauser’s Balloon lamp presents an outdoor lighting design produced through powder-bed concrete 3D printing. studiooberhauser’s Balloon lamp is fabricated using Selective Cement Activation, where cement paste is injected into a powder bed layer by layer to form a hollow spherical structure. This process enables irregular openings to be integrated directly into the surface, allowing light to pass through cavities that are generated during fabrication rather than added afterward.
studiooberhauser’s construction makes the production method visible across the surface, where layered deposition creates a granular texture and subtle stratification. The lamp is available in three sizes, including 30 cm, 70 cm, and 100 cm diameters, with the largest version recognized as one of the largest 3D-printed cement lamps at this scale. The concrete composition is engineered for outdoor durability. The spherical form operating as both a lighting element and a standalone architectural feature.
Image Credit: studiooberhauser
What Makes This Trend Stand Out
- Additive Concrete Architecture
- Enables the creation of large-scale, monolithic forms with integrated voids and textures that redefine structural and aesthetic possibilities in building components.
- Porous Functional Lighting
- Represents a shift toward lighting elements that combine structural mass with light modulation through fabrication-generated cavities, merging utility and sculptural expression.
- Visible Fabrication Aesthetics
- Offers surfaces that celebrate layer-based deposition and material granularity as a design language, transforming manufacturing traces into premium aesthetic features.
Sectors Adopting This
- Outdoor Urban Furniture
- Materials and forms like 3D-printed concrete spheres create opportunities for durable, integrated seating and lighting that double as public art and infrastructure.
- Construction Materials Manufacturing
- The selective activation process suggests new product lines of pre-formed, durable concrete elements with embedded functional porosity for rapid assembly and performance tuning.
- Custom Lighting Design
- Parametrically generated porous geometries enable lighting products where light diffusion, weight, and thermal properties are tuned through fabrication rather than post-processing.
