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Íîìåð æóðíàëà: #4-5
Ðóáðèêà:
Summary
From the editor
p. 2
It so happens that the market in lighting equipment follows a cycle that differs from the natural one. ‘Spring’ comes not once a year, but twice – in February and then again in September. This is the season we have right now: the market - no great example for nature - has just woken up after the long summer lull. The main event this September was Light Russia, the new lighting exhibition organized in Moscow by Messe Frankfurt, whose brand includes the largest lighting fairs in the world in Frankfurt, Dubai, and Hong Kong. The choice of both time and place for the Russian exhibition was spot on. September brings the traditional reawakening of the market, and Crocus Expo is a very promising new venue which continues to expand and improve its infrastructure. Following the construction of a large underground car park and covered passageways, visitors are now able to move from pavilion to pavilion without having to go outside, and the imminent opening of the metro station will put Crocus beyond the reach of its competitors. The new fair and accompanying programme attracted the attention of a large number of specialists. Our magazine took part in the peripheral programme by organizing a seminar on interior lighting involving Christian Lundwall and Rogier van der Heide. This month we also continue to talk to well-known architects whose work is in high demand and is making a noticeable contribution to the look of the new Russia. The hero of our present issue is Sergey Kiselev, architect of the year at Arch Moscow 2007, who tells us about his ‘relationship’ with lighting.
How to live
p. 12
Arch Moscow, Russia’s main architectural exhibition, was this year part of a biennale bringing together several events under a shared theme - ‘How to live’. The biennale was devoted to high-quality projects for low-cost or, to use the term employed by the organizers themselves, social housing, a subject that was all the more unexpected since until now the concept of ‘architecture’ in Russia had been applied only to buildings of an exclusive nature. Bart Goldhoorn, the invariable curator of Arch Moscow, invited 15 European firms of architects specializing in construction and modernization of standardized housing in Holland and Germany to take part. Exhibited in the International Pavilion, these architects’ works were proof that, in spite of the prejudices held by Russian developers, low-cost housing can offer scope for architectural creativity and innovation. Meanwhile, Russian architects showed ‘how to live’ on the ground floor of the Central House of Artists. Projects designed to satisfy the need for ideal mass housing were presented by Sergei Tchoban, Vladimir Plotkin, and Sergey Skuratov, as well as by Erick van Egeraat and Mary O’Lira, who are foreign architects working in Russia. There is a plan for projects shown at the exhibition to be built on sites allocated specially for this purpose (to be jointly known as the Testing Ground).
How to live… The organizers of the biennale, it seems, quite deliberately refrained from putting a question mark at the end of this phrase. It is self-evident that no immediate answer could be forthcoming. And then, this hint of ambiguity gives architects and planners space in which to continue the quest for the ‘ideal’ mass housing.
IALD Awards 2008
p. 16
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the IALD awards ceremony is part of the programme for Lightfair International, the annual fair of lighting equipment. Lightfair is the largest Northern American forum for architectural lighting design. In May this year the fair took place in Las Vegas, while the IALD awards ceremony was held in the Hotel Radisson, next to the celebrated Las Vegas Strip. By tradition, the welcome speech was given by the IALD President, Jeff Miller, who thanked everyone who had made a contribution to the development of the industry and commented on the high standard of designs submitted for this year’s competition.
Especially notable among the prizewinners in the Awards of Merit nomination, for all that the other projects were also worthy, was the House in Komae project by Mayumi Kondo.
Awards of Excellence were given to the lighting project for the Sydney Watersports Centre by Michael Harrold of Steensen Varming and Suzan Tillotson’s lighting for the School of American Ballet in New York. These works stood out for their aesthetic and ergonomic qualities.
The Radiance Award was this year given to the lighting for Barajas Airport in Madrid, a project by Speirs and Major Associates. The reward was received from Jeff Miller by Jonathan Speirs himself. In fact, this was the fifth time during the evening that Jonathan Speirs was called up on stage – which may explain why he was able to say only, “I really don’t know what to say”. But this in no way prevented Speirs and Major from being the principal hero of the IALD awards ceremony on May 29th, 2008.
Talent and marketing
p. 24
On September 10th, 2008 ‘Lighting in the interior’, a seminar organized jointly by PROSVET magazine and Messe Frankfurt and sponsored by Thorn Lighting, was held at the first Light Russia trade fair in Moscow. The speakers were two world-famous lighting designers, Rogier van der Heide and Christian Lundwall.
Van der Heide and Lundwall devoted a large part of their talks to the question of how to work with clients. Both are concerned about how to put together a successful proposal and promote a project in the face of tough requirements and short deadlines. For instance, in the HoReCa sector there can only be one solution: what is needed is segmentation of end users, i.e. hotel guests, given that non-differentiated approach to creating projects is no longer efficient or economically unjustifiable. An important positive tendency noted by both speakers in the HoReCa sector is developers’ desire to talk to lighting designers from the earliest stages of a project. Today design of a building’s utilities inevitably includes lighting systems, and this has the benefit of reducing expenditure during construction and optimizing energy consumption once a building has been completed.
All in all, the talks given by Christian Lundwall and Rogier van der Heide were further proof of what most designers have already worked out for themselves: success depends not only on talent - and lighting designers need to be market researchers, psychologists, and sales consultants, not just creators.
Spanish sun
p.26
The new terminal building at Barajas Airport, Madrid is the largest in Europe. The main feature that defines its architecture is an unusual undulating roof that soars high above the building itself. The idea of the architect, Richard Rogers, was to fill the entire interior with light. The intention was that the light should penetrate through the large skylights in the roof of the building. But modelling showed that this would give sharp variations in light levels that would be uncomfortable to the eye. To resolve this problem, the flow of light passing through the skylights was partly restricted through the use of special sunscreens made from a synthetic material that diffuses sunlight. The same sunscreens are used in the system of artificial lighting. Together with faceted mirrors, they ‘work’ as reflectors for powerful metal-halide Siteco R2 Maxi lamps fastened underneath them on special brackets. The total energy consumption of the airport’s lighting system is close to two million watts – which is way behind European standards for modern energy-saving technologies. On the other hand, the system of natural lighting employed here allows a large amount of daylight into the building while excess heat given off is kept to a minimum, considerably reducing expenditure on air-conditioning. In this way, the terminal’s lighting system is in fact well-balanced and energy-efficient.
New address
p. 32
When Solid State Lighting Solutions, a division of Philips that is still better known under its ‘maiden’ name of Color Kinetics, was planning its new headquarters, everyone working on the project was quite sure that the move would involve more than a banal increase in floor space. Color Kinetics has indeed turned its change of address into a kind of corporate manifesto. Its new brain centre at Burlington is both one of the world’s largest laboratories in the field of LED technology and a working model of the kind of ‘sustainable’ future in which everything is driven by ideas of ecological safety and preservation of natural resources.
For visitors to the company the ‘transition to the future’ begins with two ten-metre-long portals/corridors with walls and ceilings lined with LED panels. Individually controllable diodes create various dynamic and colour scripts that give a feeling of metaphysical space: it’s as if you’re diving into the very heart of the unknown.
White and coloured LEDs illuminate the conference rooms, public and work zones, laboratories, and the showroom where all the company’s existing products and technologies are displayed. All in all, the building’s interior lighting currently consists 80% of LED fixtures. The remaining 20% is a temporary concession to the imperfect state of today’s technology, a problem which the company is working hard to solve. In the near future all internal lighting will be replaced with LED fixtures: Color Kinetics is not a company that likes to compromise.
Ice age
p. 36
The Hungerberg funicular railway, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened in December 2007, has been covered in publications the world over. But reviews of this ‘Tyrolean wonder’ rarely extend beyond a series of stunning photographs accompanied by a dry recital of factual information. Their authors convey a single emotion: a state of excited stupefaction before the work of a genius. But the lighting designers from Zumtobel who created the lighting for the railway could not allow themselves to be stunned into silence by the sight of this futuristic structure. “In projects like this the requirements put forward by the designer become the stimulus that helps us push out the boundaries of the possible. The result is an unexpected, innovative solution,” says Andreas Ludwig of Zumtobel Group. The impression of weightlessness present in Hadid’s structure has been skillfully underlined by the lighting – which fills the smoothly flowing structures with a bluish radiance, making them seem to float in the air. At the same time, the diffuse illumination reinforces the dramatic chiaroscuro transitions on the surfaces of the canopies. For all their apparent lightness, these ‘icy’ structures over people’s heads seem to have been thrust up by their own might and to be vulnerable to tectonic shifts. And this must undoubtedly go down as an important achievement for the architect and lighting designers, for they have found a way to convey the atmosphere of the high mountains.
Two A’s
p. 40
Sergey Kiselev is an architect and head of Sergey Kiselev i Partnery. Last year at ARCH Moskva his firm won the Architect of the Year nomination. The high level of demand for his architectural designs is largely explained by his allegiance to what he calls the two A’s – appropriateness and ability.
Your designs include many office buildings, all of which have architectural lighting. What part do you play in the design of this lighting?
When you are designing 5-6 buildings of 200,000-300,000 m2 each simultaneously, you just don’t have enough time to deal with lighting. And although we always have our own ideas about how a building should look during the hours of darkness, we tend to wait for a specialist to come along and propose a solution that will illuminate new architectural properties in the building or, even more interestingly, compel it to reveal a new essence in the dark.
How do you usually go about choosing a contractor for this work? Do you hold bid competitions for the contract to design the lighting?
Usually we are approached by the lighting companies themselves. They say something like, “We have an idea for how to light your building.” We get many proposals, but the projects are mostly of a pretty poor standard. What we’d like to see is not just pictures, but a description of the proposed solution, diagrams showing how the fixtures are to be positioned, and justifications of the choice of type of fixtures. And then, even so, the final decision is always taken by the client. After all, it’s his money. We haven’t yet held a bid competition for the contract for a lighting project, but it would be very interesting to do so.
Traditional values
p. 58
Connoisseurs and experts rate Arturo Alvarez one of the most interesting lighting designers in Spain and his eponymous company, founded in 1994, a leader in the decorative and interior lighting sector. Alvarez works in the highly popular style that might be called ‘lampshade improvisation’ – i.e. the quest for new forms of envelope that will conceal the light source from sight. Alvarez creates his own collections based on traditional ideas of how to position lighting fixtures in space – which explains why his works so often include a mandatory set consisting of ceiling pendant, wall-mounted fixture, and table and floor-mounted lamps. This also explains the emphasis he puts on materials and textures. He is equally fearless in his treatment of both ‘historical recipes’ – such as the glass in his DOMINO, VENTO, and CEBRA collections – and new materials. Illustrations of the latter are his various-coloured silicon ‘columns of light’ (GEA) and ‘clouds’ (NEVO), his acrylic moons (GUAU), and plastic ‘bowls’ (LUA).
If we try to identify what is most important in products in the Arturo Alvarez brand, then there is one thing that stands out: Alvarez is passionate about the idea of ‘beautiful’ lighting that brings true warmth and comfort into the home. And in this respect everything that he does bears the mark of authenticity and embodies the traditional values of interior lighting.
Working on one’s mistakes
p. 60
Work on giving Moscow a modern look at night began about 15 years ago. Since then, nocturnal Moscow has become considerably lighter. But still, the considerable experience accumulated over this period has produced results that are by no means ideal.
The main problems – and accordingly the main paths for development – are to do with the fact that in Moscow lighting for streets and houses is still mainly utilitarian and far from perfect, and even if illuminated space is developing quickly, this development is not entirely harmonious. The new idea is to create a large number of lit spaces, each shaped by its own architectural and artistic concept. The plan involves switching to using mainly white light – given that white guarantees good colour reproduction and makes architecture more expressive at night. In Europe this lesson was learnt long ago, and now Moscow too will gradually move away from yellow evening lighting that distorts the light spectrum. It is also planned to phase out techniques of architectural lighting that have outlived their day – such as the technique by which the contours of buildings or particular parts of them are repeated using strings of bulbs or the use of so-called torchlight that illuminates only part of a façade and unevenly. The new concept will also see Moscow being cleared of large luminous advertising boards on the roofs of buildings. The programme should be underway by the beginning of 2009.
In quest of coloured light
p. 66
Light and colour are linked to one another like nothing else in nature. White contains all the other colours in the spectrum and the objects that surround us differ in colour only thanks to their ability to absorb light waves of a specific length. The precise shade of colour depends on the lighting and the object’s reflective qualities, making it sometimes extremely difficult to work out which colour is the ‘real’ one.
Demand for coloured light in architectural lighting design is growing. Although dichroic glass was originally developed for use in the theatre, at the end of the 1990s it began to be used in permanent architectural lighting fixtures.
Dichroic glass is a selective transmitter of light waves of certain lengths, making it in effect an instrument for creating coloured light. In essence, dichroic glass is a mirror that reflects light of one colour and transmits light of another colour. The way in which colours pass through the glass is based on the principle of light interference. The mirror is created by coating glass with a very fine, one-molecule-thick, layer of metals and oxides; for mixed colours about 20 such layers are required, with each layer being responsible for waves of a certain length. Certain manufacturers such as Rosco are capable of great precision in producing these layers – with a margin of error for wavelengths equivalent to a mere 5 nanometres. This makes it possible to produce light of any colour that may be needed.
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© 2008 Æóðíàë "PROÑÂÅÒ"
