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Íîìåð æóðíàëà: #2(3)
Ðóáðèêà:
Summary
Switched On London
p.16-19
The UK capital truly deserves to be called a city of festivals. Festivals of food, film, music follow one another in almost unending succession throughout the year with one event hardly having time to finish before the next one starts. This February, for instance, was remarkable for the fact that for an entire week from the 7th to the 14th the British capital hosted the second Switched On London festival of lighting. The action was concentrated in the city centre between London and Tower bridges and around the Bankside business district. Numerous tourist sights in this part of town were given a new look for the duration of the festival: London Bridge, the Tower, HMS Belfast, Southwark Cathedral, Hay’s Galleria, and another 11 structures were ‘dressed’ in ‘costumes’ of light that had been specially devised for the event.
The transformations were the work both of top lighting designers already famous for outstanding projects all over the world and of younger professional who have only just started putting together their portfolios. Help in implementing the projects came from well-known lighting manufacturers who made their equipment available for use in the lighting installations.
Cities all over the world continue to be lit by expensive and inefficient lighting systems. Switched On London demonstrated that there is a real alternative, underlining the importance of social, cost-saving, and ecological considerations in lighting.
The Golden Age of Couture
p.30-34
Theatricality was the main theme of a recent exhibition, ‘The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957’at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Exhibition and interior-design company Land Design Studio asked David Atkinson Lighting Design (DALD) to create lighting to enhance the theatrical effect.
David Atkinson studied at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, specializing in lighting for theatrical productions. He has experience in diverse projects including castles, interactive museums, themed attractions, and interiors.
Even for a professional with such an impressive portfolio, the Golden Age exhibition turned out to be a highly taxing task. According to David, some of the greatest challenges were not design-related but logistical. Meeting the conservation requirements was a challenge; at the same time, Land Design Studio wanted a theatrical effect without fixtures being visible to the public. In the first gallery, Atkinson took a practical approach with simple uplighting from recessed 35W T5 fluorescents onto backdrops of solid red panels and stretched scrim gauze. This ‘concealed’ light was one of the main lighting ideas for the exhibition. In the second gallery, an enclosed case featuring ball gowns was powerfully lit from on top by hidden 35W MR16 lamps angled at 36 degrees. A yarn curtain, illuminated by T5 fluorescents with lavender filters, ran from the top of the case to the ceiling, creating a sense of height and scale. A smaller gallery featuring Dior dresses designed by John Galliano was lit in pink by 65W T5 fluorescent beam shaper fixtures with shutters.
The lighting gave the exhibition ‘a real sense of drama’, according to Atkinson.
No compromising
p.44-47
The concept for the show for Prada’s new men’s collection involved creating a space that would become a kind of continuation and reflection of the collection – a space that would put across the collection’s principal idea of fashion without glitz and get the audience thinking…
The idea behind the lighting concept was to reinforce the feeling of ‘a fresh, clean sheet’, which was important if everything happening on the podium was to come across as utterly abstract and unvarnished.
So this was a beauty stripped of all ‘glamour’… Coloured lighting, dynamic effects, and the sophisticated, attention-grabbing ploys used in modern show lighting were not for this occasion. On the contrary, what was needed to get the audience thinking was lighting that was cold, hard, uncomfortable, inconvenient.
In order not to violate the integrality and transparency of the podium space and at the same time underline its abstract nature, Rogier van der Heide chose not to place the lamps directly above it as is the usual practice. The projectors and revolving heads were sited on special structures around the entire podium. But the key feature in this lighting project was the use of followspots. According to Rogier van der Heide, this type of lamp was the best way of embodying the idea of ‘pure, uncompromising’ light. He decided to place the projectors on four high metal towers, specially made for this project. The towers were set up around the podium and the rays from the projectors were directed so as to ‘slice through’ the space from all four sides, highlighting the podium. The fashion models were partly brightly lit and partly remained in shadow, i.e. they were deliberately lit ‘incorrectly’. This ‘incorrectness’ was further enhanced by fitting the followspots with square frames – which meant that the spots of light they cast were square as opposed to round, an effect which was utterly strange and unusual. But this was precisely the point of the exercise – to throw down a challenge to the audience and initiate a debate about the sense or senselessness of perfection.
Îriental fairy tale
p.48-51
‘What unusual ethno!’ is people’s usual reaction when they see the pendants and lamps made by Italian company Venetia Studium for the first time. These gorgeous lamps decorated with glass beads, tassels, and embellished with silk lampshades can be easily imagined in Scheherazade’s chamber, a maharaja castle, or an opulent Morocco riad. But you would never guess their true nationality, for in fact the shape and décor of these lamps is the pure invention of Mariano Fortuny.
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo is often described as a latter-day ‘Renaissance Man’. He was an innovator as well-versed in physics and chemistry as he was in art and design. Although remembered primarily as a dress and fabric designer, Fortuny was also a painter, engraver, architect, photographer, set designer, lighting technician, inventor, and impresario. He patented an indirect theatrical lighting system. Perhaps his most influential invention is the dimmer switch and his most well-known is the Fortuny Lamp (also known in Western countries as the Fortuny Moda Lamp). Intended for use as a stage lamp, this is an elegant illustration of his principle of reflecting diffuse light off a concave surface. A similar technique is at work in a collection of silk lamps influenced by Arabic decorative motifs, now manufactured under exclusive license by Venetia Studium.
LivingColors
p.54-55
It all began with a passion for coloured light. Philips was the first manufacturer of televisions to develop and employ a system for lighting the space around the screen in a colour to match the image on it. The next step was a concept for background interior lighting with colours that you could change as you wished. And finally Philips produced its LivingColors lamp, a bold and entirely successful experiment in the use of LED technology in home lighting.
Its unique functions make LivingColors more like a work of modern art than a technical device. This transparent polycarbonate sphere of no great size can in theory reproduce up to 16 million colours. In terms of length of service life and energy saving, LivingColors likewise knows no equal. Each of the LEDs produces luminosity equivalent to between 10 and 15 Watts.
Light colour, temperature, and intensity can be regulated using a palm-sized control panel with a sensor wheel, and up to six lamps may be controlled simultaneously using a single panel. Interesting effects can be achieved by directing the light at walls or ceilings or by playing with the diffuse- and focused-light functions.
Consumers, journalists, psychologists, architects, and lighting designers have unanimously hailed LivingColors as a triumph of intuitive design.
Doomed. To be successful
p.56-59
‘We are all personalities! We’re all one family’ is the philosophy and instruction manual espoused by Dutch designers Moooi, a firm whose original ideas for furniture, lamps, and interior objects never cease to amaze. The company’s unusual name derives from the Dutch word ‘mooi’, meaning ‘beautiful’.
Moooi showed its first collection of furniture and lights at Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2001. From the very first day it has worked with the most talented designers on the planet, including Jasper Morrison, Jurgen Bey, and Ross Lovegrove to create objects which are both unique and extraordinarily convenient. Over the six years that it has existed, Moooi has acquired a worldwide reputation. Its interior objects are incredibly popular.
One of the most interesting fields in which the company works is lighting. Moooi has created a very diverse selection of lamps, from minimalist models to reminiscences on classical themes, but they all have one quality in common: an abundance of concealed irony.
The factory’s main designer is its founder and art director, Marcel Wanders, who is the brains behind many of the lamps. One of the first was ‘Set Up Shades’ – lampshades of different colours placed one on top of another in such a way that when you turn on the light the upper shades cast a shadow on the lower ones. Moooi’s most famous lamp is Smoke Chandelier (designer: Marten Baas), which is made from charred wood.
Moooi’s amazing objects combine unique designer ideas and the functionality that is characteristic of things in everyday use. They make the home brighter, more fun, diverse, and more convenient, filling life with a positive atmosphere and carefree mood. And in this, design plays a leading role.
Light at the end of the tunnel
p.60-65
After a long interval, at the end of last year the Moscow metro presented Muscovites and visitors to the city with three new stations that are amazingly open and extraordinarily bright spaces.
The capital’s underground stations have not always been so well lit. Both the lavish places built during the first Soviet five-year plans and the standardized stations constructed during the years of the ‘thaw’ suffer from a feeling of insufficient light. Official standards of illumination for underground structures have not changed since the 1950s. These regulations are very simple: on the platform edge and on escalators luminosity must be at least 150 lux. But new understanding of the role of lighting in shaping the architectural environment and in ensuring people’s comfort and safety has resulted in a changed approache to illuminating Moscow’s metro stations.
Architects at Metrogiprotrans, Moscow’s metro design and planning department, are responsible for determining the lighting strategy for the stations. Until recently they designed everything themselves – from enormous complex chandeliers to simple sphere lamps. But in recent years lighting has been outsourced to professional companies. Currently, the Moscow metro’s main partner in supplying lighting fixtures is bps Leuchten-Systeme of Germany. The latter devises and manufactures lamps itself or places orders with its own partner companies.
Construction of the Moscow metro has revived in recent years, but the system’s development will require several more new stations. We can only hope that the lighting projects for these will furnish us with material for further conversations – especially since such a promising start has been made.
Earth, mountains, and water
p.66-69
Without exaggeration, the grandest construction project in Russian today, Sochi 2014 is the point of intersection of a great diversity of interests – political, economic, financial, sporting, and social. The scale of the work to be done is breathtaking. All of Greater Sochi is to undergo total reconstruction, including all four of the city’s districts (earth), Krasnaya polyana and its environs (mountains), and the Black Sea itself (water), where several artificial islands are to be built.
Eleven new sports structures will be concentrated in two districts - Imeretinskaya nizmennost’ for events on ice and Krasnaya polana for all others. But construction will also take place in other parts of Larger Sochi. Non-sports structures are being designed by many well-known Russian architects, including Aleksey Bavykin, Aleksey Ginzburg, Atrium, and Proekt Meganom. It is still too early to talk about architectural trends in Russia’s ‘summer capital’, but many projects are evidence of an attempt to match developers’ desire for the maximum number of square metres to Sochi’s unique landscape.
Construction will also take place on water. There are plans to create several artificial islands with quays for yachts, apartments, hotels, and entertainments complexes. The most ambitious of these is Federation Island, a project by the Dutch architect Erik van Egeraat.
In the near future Sochi will become a huge building site with enough work to satisfy everyone – architects, builders, and lighting designers alike.
Visiting the Snow Queen
p.70-73
Of all seasons it is winter that is the most creative for lighting designers. Monochrome landscapes and wide snowfields just ask to be coloured and illuminated, as a group of 10 light designers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm discovered when they visited the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden to engage in interplay with the blue winter nights.
Yngve Bergqvist of Icehotel AB is an expert in elegant designer solutions. His bold creativity was behind the birth of the Icehotel 18 years ago. Now Icehotel boasts over 60 unique rooms, a starkly beautiful church, and the Absolute Icebar. Icehotel is more than just an ice igloo; it is a museum that showcases the work of artists from all walks of life.
This year, a focus on lighting was key to the planning and design of Icehotel. As part of an ongoing effort to enhance the overall experience of visitors, a collaborative project between Icehotel’s management and light designers contributed to the planning and integration of various lighting installations in and around Icehotel.
The project helped give designers a clearer idea of what can be created with ice and snow when combined with light. The challenge lay in putting together the warm energy of light and the cold winter landscape. The light became an attraction in itself.
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© 2008 Æóðíàë "PROÑÂÅÒ"
