How illuminating!

Taking a cue from Hollywood, designers at the biennial Euroluce lighting exhibition held at the Milan furniture fair in Italy last week channeled mutant-creature B-movies with Lampzilla-sized creations.

“Designing an iconic task lamp is the holy grail,” said Pablo Pardo, owner of the San Francisco lighting firm Pablo.

Bigger, however, doesn’t mean better, particularly during a time of environmental consciousness and financial restraint. Pardo pronounced the explosion of larger-than-life versions of desk lamps to be kitschy -- “and, in this day and age, somewhat irresponsible.”

Even so, a ceiling-scraping version of the 1986 classic Tolomeo desk lamp drew large, often bemused crowds at the Artemide display. So did Genesy, architect Zaha Hadid’s new sci-fi-looking light, which would need a ray gun to shrink it to fit on a table.

In a tip of the hat to the oversized sculptures of Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, the Italian outdoor firm Ares showed the towering Greta, a lamp with an enameled shade hung off a stainless steel arm.

Out of Stock, a collective of young designers from Singapore, Argentina and Spain, showed the aptly named Sherlock. Twenty-six light-emitting diodes encircle the rim of what looks like a magnifying glass. Light can be pointed toward a wall or ceiling for ambience or directed downward to illuminate the pages of a whodunit.

The Dutch collective Moooi offered three takes on oversized illumination. The first, designed by Studio Job, swathed a bulked-up bedside lamp in white paper. For another, Raimond Puts reinvented the bubble pendant lamp with as many as 1,212 LEDs in wire frames. And further pushing the trend of super-sized desk lamps, the design studio Freshwest jerry-rigged a light that looked like a giant Jenga game, made of wooden sticks with metal counterweights and orange cords.

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