Polam Poznań

Polam Poznań was the lighting works of the Polish Polam group in Poznań, in western Poland, and its lamps belong to the wave of state-made domestic lighting that filled Polish homes in the later decades of the People's Republic. The registered name of the plant was Zakłady Sprzętu Oświetleniowego “POLAM-Poznań” w Poznaniu, and it stood on Jeleniogórska street. Today its products circulate as vintage table lamps and floor lamps, which sellers date anywhere from the 1960s to the 1980s.

“Polam” was never a single factory. It was the name of a central organisation of Poland's lighting and electromechanical industry, formed at the end of 1971 and active until 1989, which brought works in Warsaw, Katowice, Pabianice, Piła, Wilkasy, Gdańsk and other towns under one trade name. Light bulbs, industrial fittings and household lamps were all made under it. For a collector the word on the label therefore names the system, while the town that follows it tells you which plant made the piece.

The roots of the Poznań plant lie in earlier local enterprises. A register of liquidated businesses gives as its former names a labour cooperative called Lumet and the Poznań Metalworks (Poznańskie Zakłady Metalowe, “Posamet”). Lumet lamps with golden glass shades are dated to the 1960s, which suggests that lamp making in the city is older than the Polam label. The register gives no founding or closing dates, and no history of the works has turned up in the sources consulted, so none are claimed here.

Pieces attributed to the plant in current listings include a glass table lamp dated to the 1960s or 1970s and a floor lamp dated to the 1970s or 1980s. Across the Polam works as a whole the range ran from desk lamps, pendants and sconces to chandeliers and round glass shades, built from metal, glass and, in some designs, ceramic. The look is plain and functional, sometimes with a decorative touch.

Industrial lamps of this kind were seldom credited to a designer. Where names are known, as for the desk lamps that the Warsaw Polam works registered in 1984, they come from design registers rather than from the object itself. No designer has been identified for the Poznań plant's output.

After the central Polam organisation was dissolved in 1989, its works went separate ways. The bulb factory in Piła was bought by Philips in 1991, the Gdańsk plant had moved to a new site in 1986, and the Warsaw works was demolished in 2006. The Poznań plant now appears among liquidated companies, and its personnel and payroll files are kept in the archive of the Greater Poland voivodeship office in Poznań; the date of closure is not stated. Sellers usually name the maker as “Polam Poznań” or “Z.S.O. Polam Poznań”, so the town on a label or in a listing is worth checking against the other Polam plants.