Frank Gehry designed the first of his famous fish lamps in 1983, when he was asked by the Formica Corporation for ways to use the company’s new laminate product, ColorCore, which was colored all the way through, rather than just on the surface. When Gehry was playing around with the material, he broke a piece, which looked to him like a fish scale — and the rest is design history, with the fish swimming into the collections of art world notables like Jasper Johns.