Lee Broom’s Beacon Completes Its Loop in the Country That Made Its Glass

Lee Broom’s Beacon reached Piazza San Babila for Milan Design Week 2026, the second stop on a tour that began on London’s South Bank and ends, fittingly, in the Czech Republic, at the one design festival whose entire 2026 theme is light, and in the country where the sculpture’s recycled glass was actually made.

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Introduction

Lee Broom’s Beacon stood in Piazza San Babila from 20 to 26 April 2026, as part of the wider cultural programme running through Via Durini and Corso Monforte during Milan Design Week. The sculpture, made with the Czech lighting and glass manufacturer Brokis and the London materials consultancy Materials Assemble, stands 4.9 metres tall and is built from 292 handcrafted glass panels weighing 584 kilograms in total, every one of them cast from waste glass left over from Brokis’s own production process. A programmed lighting sequence runs through it: a slow pulse every fifteen minutes, building to a fuller crescendo on the hour.

Milan was not Beacon’s first appearance, and it will not be its last. The sculpture debuted on London’s South Bank in September 2025 and is scheduled to travel on to the Czech Republic later in 2026, to the country where Brokis casts its glass in the first place. Read as a single itinerary rather than three separate events, that route closes a loop: a monument built from a Czech factory’s waste glass, unveiled in London against a backdrop of Victorian street furniture, now touring toward the one Czech design festival built entirely around the theme of light.

What is actually standing in the square

Beacon reads, at a glance, as a chandelier grown to civic scale: a cluster of illuminated glass lamp shades held aloft on a black metal framework, tall enough to be seen from across the piazza and dense enough with individual lights to read as a single sculptural mass rather than a collection of separate fittings. Each of the 292 glass panels was fused from recycled shards of handblown glass, cut with a water jet once fused, and finished with a texture that replicates the grain of Baltic pine, a detail lifted directly from the board-marked concrete of the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank, where wooden formwork left its grain pattern in the cast concrete when the building went up. The same texture that reads as a load-bearing material flaw on a 1960s concrete wall has been deliberately recreated in cast glass here, which is a more specific piece of material research than most sculptures built from recycled offcuts attempt.

Materials Assemble, the London consultancy behind that fusing process, works across glass, ceramics, marble, wood, metal and textiles, curating a materials library for architects and designers and running bespoke manufacturing alongside it. The firm has spent roughly a decade researching craftsmanship techniques specifically to build that library, and its stated position is that sustainability has to be designed in at a project’s start rather than added to a finished object afterwards, which is closer to how Beacon’s material actually came together: the recycled glass was not sourced after Broom had already settled on a design, it was the starting condition the design had to answer to.

The lighting choreography is the sculpture’s other authored decision rather than a technical afterthought. A slow pulse repeats every fifteen minutes and intensifies into a fuller sequence on the hour, a piece of programming written into the fixture rather than left to a lighting designer to improvise later. In London, that hourly crescendo was timed to Big Ben’s chimes, audible across the Thames from the installation’s South Bank site. Milan has no equivalent civic clock to synchronise against, so the piece runs on its own internal rhythm there, a small but real difference between how the same object behaves in two different cities.

A chandelier built from a misidentified Victorian street lamp

Broom has cited two specific references for Beacon’s form: the mid-century architecture of the Royal Festival Hall, outside which the sculpture stood in London, and a set of Victorian lamp posts a short walk from it, on the Victoria Embankment. Those lamp posts were designed by the architect George John Vulliamy and modelled by the sculptor Charles Henry Driver, commissioned by the Metropolitan Board of Works and published in March 1870, their bases wrapped in a pair of intertwined fish figures inspired directly by the dolphin statues at the Fontana del Nettuno in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. They have been known as the Embankment’s dolphin lamps for a century and a half, and the identification is very probably wrong: the fish on Vulliamy’s lamp posts are more likely sturgeon than dolphins, a piece of Victorian confusion that has stuck so hard the posts are Grade II listed under the dolphin name regardless.

The Hayward Gallery itself, whose concrete grain Beacon’s glass replicates, opened on 9 July 1968, designed under team leader Norman Engleback with John Attenborough, Ron Herron and Warren Chalk for the Greater London Council’s own Department of Architecture and Civic Design, and built by the contractor Higgs and Hill. Its board-marked concrete, cast against timber formwork so the wood’s own grain transferred into the finished wall, was a structural necessity turned into a visible texture, exactly the kind of raw material honesty Broom has reproduced in glass rather than concrete a few hundred metres from the building that inspired it.

Beacon borrows the same basic grammar, a cluster of ornamented lamp posts standing together rather than a single fitting, without literally reproducing Vulliamy’s ironwork. The connection matters less as decoration than as an argument: London’s most photographed stretch of Victorian street lighting has been misnamed for 150 years, and a new sculpture referencing it in 2025 was itself built to be taken apart and renamed. Beacon has already been Beacon, a temporary Southbank landmark, and it will end its life as a series of individual table lamps sold to fund a charitable cause once its tour concludes, which means the sculpture standing in Piazza San Babila is one stage in an identity it was always designed to shed, not unlike the lamp posts it borrows from.

The glassworks the tour is heading back to

Brokis casts its glass at the Janštejn Glassworks in Horní Dubenky, roughly 140 kilometres southeast of Prague, a factory with roots in the early nineteenth century that had fallen into decline by the 1990s, its traditional glassblowing techniques and ageing workforce both at risk of disappearing. The entrepreneur Jan Rabell bought the struggling works in 1997, modernised its furnaces while deliberately keeping its historic hand techniques and forgotten colour formulas in production, and launched Brokis as a brand in 2006 to put that revived Bohemian glassmaking in front of an international lighting market. The approach was recognised in 2023, when Czech handmade glass received UNESCO recognition, a status the Janštejn works helped earn by keeping techniques alive that had nearly been lost a generation earlier.

That history is the part of Beacon’s story that neither its London debut nor its Milan appearance foregrounds, and it is worth foregrounding, because Beacon is built entirely from waste glass generated during Brokis’s own production runs at that same factory, its largest single bespoke commission to date. A sculpture about recycling material into something new is standing on the foundation of a factory that was itself rescued and remade a generation before the sculpture existed. When Beacon travels on to the Czech Republic later in 2026, for Designblok, Prague’s international design festival, it will not simply be touring to another design capital. It will be returning, glass and concept both, to the country and in large part the very factory that made it possible, arriving for a festival whose 28th edition has set an entire year’s curatorial theme around a single word: light.

Brokis’s largest commission, verified by the numbers a badge can’t fake

Every one of Beacon’s 292 panels weighs close to two kilograms, cut and shaped after fusing rather than moulded whole, which is part of why the finished sculpture can carry genuine structural presence rather than reading as a lightweight prop. Brokis’s glass products, including the material in Beacon, carry Environmental Product Declaration certification, verified through formal life-cycle assessment rather than a marketing claim, documenting the material’s environmental footprint from raw waste glass through to finished, illuminated panel. In April 2026, ahead of Salone del Mobile, ICON magazine named Beacon its Installation of the Year, citing its combination of historical reference, sculptural presence and material honesty, recognition that arrived specifically because the sculpture could show its working, not just describe it.

Lee Broom’s own route from theatre school to a piazza

Lee Broom founded his studio in London in 2007, more than a decade after training at theatre school and then studying fashion design at Central Saint Martins, a background that began, at seventeen, with a fashion competition win that put him briefly under Vivienne Westwood’s wing. That theatrical training is not incidental to how Beacon works in a public square: a piece designed to be watched by people who did not come specifically to see it, timed to a repeating light sequence rather than left static, is a stage direction as much as a lighting design decision. The same instinct is visible much earlier and much smaller in scale, in Kaleidoscopia, the mirrored lighting installation Broom staged inside his own Rivington Street showroom for London Design Festival 2019, where seventeen Orion fittings and two mirrors were arranged to read as a chandelier of more than two hundred lights. Broom’s practice has built a reputation on narrative-driven, site-specific commissions rather than standalone product design alone, work that now sells through more than 250 stores in 48 countries, but Beacon belongs to the smaller category of his work built for a temporary public audience rather than a private interior, a category that also includes his stairwell commission for the Mandarin Oriental Mayfair and the mythological Alchemist collection shown in London. Both of those earlier pieces stayed inside a single building, seen by people who had already chosen to walk through the door. Beacon is the first of the three built for a genuinely public square, seen as readily by someone crossing Piazza San Babila with no interest in design as by anyone attending Milan Design Week specifically, which is a different and harder brief: the work has to hold attention without the context a gallery wall or a hotel lobby would otherwise supply.

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Final thoughts

A South Bank landmark, a Milan piazza fixture and, later this year, a Prague festival piece are really the same object on one continuous itinerary: a sculpture built from a Czech factory’s own waste glass, launched beside a set of London lamp posts that have been misnamed for a century and a half, and now heading home to close its tour at the one festival built entirely around the idea it has been demonstrating in public squares all year.

The same Milan-first pattern runs through Kartell’s Shape of What’s Next, whose Future Perspectives collection also launched at Salone del Mobile before travelling on to London and Dubai.