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Íîìåð æóðíàëà: #1(2)
Ðóáðèêà:
Summary
From the editor
This is a new magazine. Like all new projects, it has involved a great deal of drive, interesting meetings, and unforgettable trips. There’s no time to stop: you’re constantly moving onto the next thing. And yet at the beginning of the journey it’s worth slowing down a little so as to take account of previous experience and think where you’re going and how to get there.
That the lighting market in Russia is developing is
an indisputable fact. Perhaps it is not developing as fast as the markets in cars or new construction. For this we could name a number of reasons, such as the lack of up-to-date and objective information on the state of the market, new technology, experience in realizing genuinely complex projects, and on companies and specialists capable of realizing such projects. And here the problem is not lack of information providers: Russia now has a variety of periodicals on lighting, and some of them have been around for quite some time. All were set up by companies working in specific sectors of the market and reflected these companies’ interests, essentially serving as an instrument for developing their businesses. As time went by, these publications fulfilled their purposes and were then closed down. What was needed was a different kind of magazine, one that would be identically beneficial for all players on the market – manufacturers, product designers, and lighting designers – as a means of providing consumers with information on quality products and services and clients with information on consumers. Such a magazine has now appeared: you’re holding it in your hands.
New twist
The last days of November 2007 brought the 13th Intersvet international lighting fair, held in the three pavilions of Expocentre on Krasnaya Presnya in Moscow. Approximately 400 companies from Russia and abroad attended, with many well-known participants occupying their usual places. By tradition, the dense rows of stands belonging to exhibitors from Germany were led by OSRAM. German firms – including manufacturers of not just ready-to-use equipment but materials and lamp parts as well – maintain a constant interest in this exhibition.
The low number of Italian and Spanish companies attending was no surprise, given that in recent years their presence at Intersvet has been in decline. This, however, was more than made up for by the Russian participants, of whom there were 30% more than last year; moreover, this growth was solely due to an increase in manufacturers. There were no new Russian firms offering services in lighting design, a fact which is only to be expected given how difficult it is for companies to enter this sector of the market. The entire set up would have been entirely familiar to participants and visitors had not Ost-West Partners, the fair organizers, not decided to devote a special section to semi-conductor lighting. Professor Yulian Ayzenberg helped organize an LED-Forum, a special exhibition and conference on LED technology with manufacturers of LEDs and LED lighting devices (among whom the most noticeable were OSRAM, Prosoft, and Seoul Semiconductor) showing their latest developments.
Radiance
With the onset of each winter Glasgow, a Scottish city with a wealth of historical traditions, is transformed into a venue for festive events. On George Square, the city’s central square, Christmas lights are set up, there’s a fireworks display, and a New Year’s ice show. But the main event of Winterfest 2007 was the Radiance festival of light. For the first time in its history, Glasgow for three days became a gigantic stage for breathtaking fantasies by lighting designers from Great Britain and other countries. 42 lighting installations embellished the city’s bridges, buildings, shop windows, interior courtyards, lakes, ponds, and parks from High Street to Buchanan Street.
The opening ceremony for Radiance took place beside the cathedral, attracting large numbers of tourists and residents. The audience looked on enchanted as to the accompaniment of medieval music the façade of the Gothic cathedral was first painted in light in the manner of an old fresco, was then covered in ancient writing, and finally bloomed with wild flowers. The show’s author, French artist and lighting designer Xavier de Richemont, says he used light and music to reflect the city’s legends and history.
Winterfest is managed and financed by Glasgow City Council, the city’s development fund, and Glasgow Marketing Bureau. The city rightly believes that such events enhance its image and further its own development.
Materialization
In traditional architecture lighting is most often used merely to place accents and underline and contrast the structural and decorative features of a building or interior. An approach which treats lighting as the structural basis of an entire project is still rare. However, it was the latter understanding of lighting and what lighting can do that inspired architect Steven Holl in his concept for the new building for the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, USA. Here light has been turned into one of the main ‘building materials’.
The evening lighting for the new museum wing gives it the appearance of a cascade of shapes glittering with a cold fluorescent light. Five irregular prisms of semi-transparent glass rise out of the dark green of the hill.
Daylight enters the gallery through the glass walls and abundant slits made in the load-bearing walls at ground level. The variable external luminous environment becomes almost the main event in the internal life of this building.
Renfro Design started working on the project in 2000, taking responsibility for developing and realizing lighting plans. Although Richard Renfro insists that his role is strictly technical, emphasizing that ‘the lighting concept had already been determined by the architects’, Renfro Group has realized some truly revolutionary ideas. The company’s approach was based on the idea of integrating natural and artificial light.
Attempting to put this idea into practice in the interior of the building confronted Renfro with a dilemma: how to admit rich natural light into the gallery without exposing museum exhibits to excessive sunlight?
Starlight
In recent years lighting for television show programmes has tended to use large numbers of LED screens. When it comes to creating various decorative effects, LED screens are, of course, irreplaceable. But lighting for musical shows calls for more than just decorativeness. This particular show consists of separate and often very different acts, and the lighting for it places great importance on other equipment and techniques to create mood, express the character of the performers, and underline nuances in the music. Precisely for this reason, in an attempt to get away from standard approaches, the project producers set out to use as few LED screens as possible. The intention was to employ new patterns of illumination that would differ from those in common use.
A special set was constructed for filming – beams, girders, ceiling panels, and stretches of brick wall that fitted neatly into the large pavilion. An important part of the set was a black background formed by a 45-metre-long curtain studded with LEDs. Black is an extremely advantageous colour for lighting: against a black background rays of light show up brightly in the smoke. A special feature of the project was a ceiling LED screen placed directly above the centre of the stage and consisting of three square girders with LED modules. The intricate shape of the stage was underlined by a luminous cord made from flexible neon. The LEDs were controlled using two Catalyst video servers.
4Seasons
Light and darkness are two opposite states of the space around us. When they come into contiguity with one another, we sense the fullness and majesty of nature’s forms. Optimal illumination of a natural object involves creating a natural balance between light and darkness. This is the purpose of 4Seasons, a series of new lamps from Prisma. Its designers, the Italian architects Francesco Iannone and Serena Tellini of Consuline, have created something more than just landscape lighting - an intriguing game whose object is to change the image of a garden from season to season.
To begin with, Iannone and Tellini came up with the idea of classifying plants according to their silhouettes. Then for each basic silhouette they developed a lighting scheme and created a lamp and a range of accessories. How these lamps distribute light is determined by their bodies. DECO has five ‘windows’ that uniformly radiate light in all directions. BOX with two ‘windows’ and CUT with three provide focussed light in one direction and upwards. The ‘windows’ are fitted with special screens with geometrical or decorative slits that change the shape of the luminous beam and form whimsical contrasts of light and darkness on leafage. Equipped with light sources of variable colour, 4Seasons is capable of transforming the landscape in amazing ways. These lamps bring out the natural qualities of each season and create dynamic visual effects, putting in the hands of landscape architects and lighting designers all the expressive potential of scenography.
History of success
Murano glass is one of those things like Carrara marble or Parma ham that are definitive of Italian material culture. Since the 1960s the Italian glass-blowing industry has been experiencing an unprecedented boom and, just as many centuries ago, companies from the island of Murano top the list of the world’s best glass workshops.
When they set up their family firm here in 1972, Roberto and Francesca Vecchi were well aware that the genius loci could prove as much a problem as an advantage in developing their business. They quickly realized that a successful marketing strategy cannot be based on ‘secrets of craftsmanship’ alone. So they opted for a niche approach, focussing on the creation of custom-made high-tech lamps for large clients while simultaneously tapping the ‘luxury’ consumer market. By 1985 this strategy had already begun paying clear dividends.
To design its lamps, the company commissions world-famous artists such as Philippe Starck, Karim Rashid, and Tobio Scarpa. The latter’s Nastro collection with its unforgettable use of intertwined glass ribbons of different colours has been the firm’s calling card for seven years now.
Against the background of the company’s cutting-edge and experimental collections, Soirée, a new collection created only last year, marks a return to classic Venetian glass – to the centuries-old forms of lavish chandeliers from ancient palazzos. But here too tradition has been supplemented by a rich variety of colours and greater freedom in the treatment of material, filling the old-fashioned elegance with new meaning.
Stages of a grand journey
In November 2007 a decision was taken to award the contract for the detailed design work for the architectural lighting for Federation Tower at Moscow City to Arup Lighting, whose head is the well-known Dutch lighting designer Rogier van der Heide.
The Federation Tower complex consists of two towers situated on a multi-tier podium and linked by a shared stylobate. There are only a few buildings in the world capable of challenging the Federation in terms of height – the Empire State Building in New York, Sirs Tower and the John Hancock Center in Chicago, the Bank of America building in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the famous ‘Twin Towers’ in the Emirates. Illuminating high-rise buildings is a difficult, prestigious, and time-consuming task which is usually entrusted to the most outstanding architects and lighting designers. It was for this reason that in spring 2006 Mirax Group, the developer for Federation Tower, commissioned illuminator group of Moscow to hold an international competition to find the best architectural-lighting concept for the complex. Entrants included Agence Concepto (France), Light+Design Associates (Great Britain), Arup Lighting (USA, Great Britain, Netherlands), Maurice Brill Lighting Design (Great Britain), and Lighting Design Austria. However, no winner was chosen.
Instead, specialists at Mirax Group and illuminator group took the most promising ideas from the competition entries and combined them to create a lighting concept for the complex. Arup Lighting was then invited to realize this concept.
Mirax Group plans to complete installation of the lighting system for the ‘South’ Tower by the end of this year. ‘East’, the second tower to be built, will be included in the lighting scheme at a later date.
Russian New Year
One day, the important statesmen sitting in the State Duma in Moscow decided to make Russian citizens a present of protracted New Year’s holidays. As a result, on the eve of every New Year the whole country has to think hard to work out how best to use its ten-day vacation. Some set off for distant lands, others remain at home. The latter is the more difficult option since the desire to gulp down festive salads ends rather sooner than the holidays themselves, leaving loads of free time to be somehow disposed of.
On one such long evening, when all my friends had vanished off the horizon and the recurring faces on television were already beginning to seem like tedious relatives, I set off for a tour of Moscow’s festive illuminations.
Moscow is not one of those cities where it’s possible to get lost in the dark. On the contrary, it turned out to be difficult to find anything out of the ordinary on the city’s brightly lit streets. And yet I was in luck. At the beginning of Kutuzovsky prospekt I found a row of four oval LED screens whose shape and size gave them the appearance of the funnels of an old ship. Here, though, the resemblance ended since the ‘funnels’ were illuminated with the digits 2008, which alternated with brightly coloured images of snowflakes and other typical features of the winter holidays.
A surprising sight was fountains that are usually ‘dead’ at this time of year, but now had jets of multi-coloured LED light streaming out of them. On Tsvetnoy bul’var a forest of strange-looking trees had sprung up. Blue, red, white, and green, they glowed in the dark like something mysterious at the bottom of some ocean.
But the most captivating spectacle of all awaited me beside the Moscow University building, above which a genuine battle, like something out of Star Wars, was raging: mighty green rays were crossing each other in the dark sky like the swords of the Jedi.
In the quest for luminous treats time slipped by almost unnoticed, and then the festivities came to an end. Now we’ll have to wait a while to see what illuminations Moscow will wear on the eve of 2009.
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© 2008 Æóðíàë "PROÑÂÅÒ"
