Liechtenstein Government Building Gets a 3D-Printed Chandelier for Its Historic Ceremonial Hall

Header: IKR/Martin Walser

Lighting designer Julia Hartmann, Founder and Principal of Lightsphere GmbH, and product designer Markus Bischof, Founder of MARKUS BISCHOF Produktdesign, are the creators of a new chandelier for a Liechtenstein government building in Vaduz. The piece, which hangs in the ceremonial hall Fürst Johannes Saal, is the “Heritage Lighting Design” category winner of the LIT Lighting Design Awards 2025.

Hartmann, who runs Lightsphere from Zurich and Vaduz, developed the lighting design for the whole government building and managed the project, while Bischof, whose studio is located in Nuremberg, designed the chandelier itself. The two of them worked with the Winterthur manufacturer Monolicht, who had never built a fixture this way before. The piece was put into place on the 14th of February, 2025, immediately giving the hall the spotlight it had been missing for about forty years.

The room and its first chandelier

The government building was designed by the Viennese architect Gustav Ritter von Neumann and opened on the 28th of December, 1905, with a sitting of parliament. Prince Johann II gave the land and 100,000 crowns towards a total cost of 377,528, at a time when the state’s entire annual income was around 306,000. Electricity was so scarce in Vaduz then that the government had to buy current from the Jenny-Spörry cotton mill, and the supply contract capped the whole building at 200 lamps burning at once (each of sixteen candles and 3.3 watts).

The hall on the second floor served as the parliamentary chamber, with the prince having paid for its decoration as well. Viennese artists filled the wall niches with princely portraits and coats of arms, while the sculptor Josef Beyer made the half-figure of Johann II that can still be seen on the north wall. Hanging in the middle of the ceiling was a large wrought-iron chandelier, designed by von Neumann and made in the Viennese court metalworking shop of Valerian Gillar, which was another gift from the prince.

The original chandelier came down during one of the renovations of the second half of the century, either the one in 1969 or the one in 1985 and 1986, when it was found that the concrete floor slabs were badly underdimensioned and that the whole second floor needed to be reworked. Neither the government’s published history of the building nor the 1993 brochure on the works says which of the two it was or where the historic piece is stored. Parliament itself moved out in 1989, so the hall spent the following decades as a ceremonial room with an empty ceiling.

Working a protected room

When the government decided to renovate the hall in 2024 and 2025, three things immediately jumped out as musts: a switch to LED lighting, better acoustics and a careful reworking of the room’s appearance. Hartmann, who had already worked in Vaduz on the Vaduzer Saal and on the government building’s media room, was an easy choice for the lighting design and the overall project management. Rico Malgiaritta of Planbar, an architecture practice in Triesen, handled the architectural side of the work, while Vincent Beck of the Ruggell engineering company Planing looked after the electrical installation.

The project started in the archives, where historic drawings, photographs and written records showed the team what the original chandelier had looked like and how it had filled up the room. They decided early on not to copy it: the proportions, the size and the position would be kept, since those elements were what had given the room its charm, while the form itself would be entirely new.

Three constraints then shaped everything that followed:

• The government building has been under heritage protection since 1992, so the original walls, ceiling and paintings could not be touched.
• The holes already cut into the ceiling for the old fittings could not be moved, enlarged or added to, which ruled out any structural work and left the designers only those points to hang from.
• The chandelier had to be designed, manufactured and installed within 6 months, for a cost agreed at the start of the project.

The new chandelier’s shape

Bischof based the shape of the new centrepiece on a spinning top, the child’s toy that rotates on itself in an upright position, having used two stacked rings to achieve that look: the wider one above and the narrower below.

Because the ceiling points could not be strengthened, as seen above, weight decided almost everything about how the piece was built, as a chandelier 2.2 metres wide made conventionally in metal would have been far too heavy to hang there at all. Printing it layer by layer, in metal and in polyglass made from recycled PET bottles, took more than 85 per cent off the weight. That brought the finished chandelier down to 42 kgs, roughly the weight of two full suitcases.

Monolicht, who produced the chandelier with Feramic AG, said the process is unique in Europe at this scale and that it raised two problems. The first was combining metal and plastic in one printed object, which took careful matching of the two materials. The second was accuracy, since every printed part had to come out precise enough to fit the others across a piece 2.2 metres wide. The design also carefully runs the electrics through the wires that hold the chandelier up and places the control gear inside the body, so no cables or boxes are seen from below.

“Its iconic appearance, reminiscent of a spinning top, symbolises the balance between tradition and the future.”

Taken from Lightsphere GmbH

Six groups of light

Hartmann divided the light inside the chandelier into six groups, each controlled separately. The first two are quite basic, as one sends light up onto the coffered ceiling (a grid of sunken square panels) and the other lights the room through eight small downlights. The other four are located directly in the rings and give off different colour temperatures: both the upper and lower ring can be set to 2200 kelvin, about as warm as candlelight, or to 3000 kelvin, a warm white. The hall can, therefore, be lit brightly for a working meeting or turned down to something much softer for a reception.

The whole system runs on KNX, a standard that controls lighting and other building services from a single location, so staff can set the room by pressing a single preset. Custom rosettes, the custom-made round plates that frame each opening in the ceiling, hold the wiring and the downlights, with their colours and gold tones having been matched to the existing paintwork.

Hartmann also swapped the curtains the architects had planned for pleated blinds, which sit flat against the glass and so uncovered the original columns between the windows and restored the wall’s symmetry. Switching to LED and splitting the light into separate zones cut the room’s energy use by around 90%.

The two designers

Julia Hartmann studied interior design and moved into lighting while she was still a student, having later founded Lightsphere in 2019, which she now runs from Zurich and Vaduz. She was the first certified lighting designer in Switzerland and co-founded the IALD Alpine Chapter, and she won a 40 Under 40 lighting design award in 2019.

Markus Bischof trained as a joiner before studying product design and spent two years working on the design of Trumpf punching machines. In 2010, he set up his own studio in Nuremberg under the line “products beyond function”. He has since produced more than 300 concepts and products, mostly lamps, chairs and furniture for the international market, and has collected a series of international design awards along the way.

Project information

Lighting Design: Lightsphere GmbH (Julia Hartmann)
Chandelier Design: Markus Bischof Produktdesign (Markus Bischof)
Architecture Company: Planbar AG
Other Credits: Monolicht GmbH, Feramic AG, Planing Ingenieurunternehmung AG
Client: Government Real Estate Unit
Photography: IKR/Martin Walser, Julian Konrad
Location: Vaduz
Date: March 2025