lighting – The Architect's Writer

all published articles, architecture, lighting, mondo arc

Tadao Ando

By Robert Such. Published in mondo arc.

The Minamidera Art House Project guide, standing at the entrance to the rectangular wooden building that houses James Turrell’s lighting installation, politely instructs each visitor to keep a hand on the wall when inside the building. It’s not clear why we need to do this, but it soon makes sense – it’s pitch black inside. Only after a few minutes do my eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and a faint rectangular light starts to appear out of the gloom. It’s some distance away across the dark interior, but it’s hard to tell how far…

Designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the Minamidera Art House Project building that houses Turrell’s lightwork stands on the island of Naoshima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Naoshima is one of a number of islands on which stand museums, art spaces and outdoor artworks.
Admired by Ando, the American light artist James Turrell is one of many architects and artists that have influenced the way that Ando has worked with light throughout his life. Ando has joined forces with Turrell on projects numerous times, and Turrell’s work continues to be an inspiration. Turrell also has lightworks in the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima – a museum also designed by Ando.

“It is particularly important,” said the 1995 Pritzker Prize winning Ando, “to take steps forward when building a museum for contemporary art. Artists are very courageous. They are stepping forward all of the time. Architects must do the same.

“We must share the fear of challenging the unseen world. We are all humans, and we can be courageous, but we cannot escape fear when taking risks. As long as you dare to step forward, and have some experience, you are not likely to fail.”

As for architects that inspired him, it was Le Corbusier that had a strong influence on Ando’s early career. He first became aware of the Swiss-French architect’s work while perusing the bookshelves in an old bookshop in his hometown of Osaka.

“I first laid my eyes on a portfolio of Le Corbusier in the art section of that bookstore,” Ando explains. “Immediately, I felt in my bones – this is it.” At that time he was, he says, “very passionate about life, but my destiny was yet to be defined.” It was a life-changing turning point for the 20-year-old would-be architect who was then working part-time at an architecture firm.
The Le Corbusier book was too expensive to buy straight away though, so Ando saved up and was able to buy it about a month later. Then he read it “page by page, every night until I grew tired of it”, he says.

“Even though my knowledge was not extensive enough to understand the intricacies of modernism, the contents of the book were utterly fascinating. Each page was beautifully laid out with close-up and wide-angle architectural photographs in addition to attractive plans and sketches.”
Wanting to be able to design in this way, he “traced Le Corbusier’s floor plans over and over again”.

Born and raised in Osaka in a traditional residential neighbourhood, Ando’s home was a small terraced house. He describes it as “a dark place with little light and small windows”.

“In the dim interior, I appreciated what little light we received. I would often fill my cupped hands with light coming into my room. Since then, this is the type of architecture I’ve wanted to build: architecture that values light and reminds me of the same feelings I experienced as a child.

“Nature in the form of light, water, and sky restores architecture from a metaphysical to an earthly plane and gives life to space. A concern for the relationship between architecture and nature inevitably leads to a concern for the temporal context of architecture. I want to emphasise the sense of time and to create compositions in which a feeling of transience or the passing of time is a part of the spatial experience.”

Another book that had a profound influence on the young Ando was a thin, but influential book called In Praise of Shadows by the well-known Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. The book details Tanizaki’s thoughts on light and shadows in various aspects of Japanese culture. “The balance of light and shadow is always difficult. Without shadow, one cannot fully appreciate light,” says Ando.

Inside another of Ando’s well-known works, the Ibaraki Kasugaoka Church in Ibaraki, just outside Osaka, light and shadow also play a key role in a visitor’s experiential appreciation of the building interior. More commonly known as the Church of the Light, the building’s most striking feature is a cruciform opening, cut out in the concrete, in the wall facing the congregation.

It is also a project that Ando returned to time and again to try and convince the client to remove the glass that was installed to keep out the rain and wind. When Ando first designed the Church of the Light in 1989, he proposed that the cross be open to the elements in order “to introduce pure and natural light into the space,” he says. The client refused to remove the glass.

Ando eventually gave up, so he did the next best thing: make a life-size replica of the church, for an exhibition. In his version there was no glass, just as he wanted it to be. “In comparison to the original church, the experience of light had significantly intensified,” he says.
When Ando thinks of great uses of light in architecture, it is monasteries that come to mind, such as the Thoronet Abbey and the Notre-Dame de Sénanque Abbey in France. “The light found inside these religious buildings create space and carry life.

“When I first entered Abbaye du Thoronet, I encountered a feeling of great power. In the profound silence of the place, I became aware of the light transcending the severity of religious precepts. In order to appreciate the beauty of light and the spaces it illuminates, darkness is absolutely necessary.”

Necessary, yes; yet in the Minamidera Art House Project, where there is no light at all at first, the complete darkness in the building is unnerving. But the mystery and the eventual surprise revelation make Turrell’s light artwork, and the islands in the Seto Inland Sea generally, well worth visiting – just like the architectural works of Japan’s most famous architect, whose thoughtfully designed and beautifully made works can be found all over Japan and in many other locations around the world, and who believes that although shadows are necessary, “light is pivotal for the livelihood of humankind”.

all published articles, lighting, mondo arc

Martin Klaasen

By Robert Such. Published in mondo arc.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, lighting designer Martin Klaasen has been involved in a long list of iconic projects in Asia and Australia as well as being at the forefront of lighting education in the region.

In the lighting business for almost 40 years, Martin Klaasen, Principal at Klaasen Lighting Design (KLD), traces his ability to manage the ups and downs of his career to the influence of a number of people. Making the top of the list though is his grandmother: Geneviève Dreyfus-Sée. An architect in France, as well as a writer and educator, she has been Klaasen’s biggest inspiration.

“What I most admired in her,” says Klaasen, “was her perseverance, belief in herself and her independence. She did not care what people thought of her, whether she was successful or not. She studied and wrote about the history of architecture because she was passionate about it. She wrote about her experiences bringing up her children during the war, wrote children’s books to share the stories she taught her children, because she believed in it and just wanted to share it.”

And over the past 26 years as his own boss, Klaasen’s own “persistence and belief have always kept me going,” he says. And passion, too. “While I was passionate creating beautiful lighting projects at the beginning of my career, I am now passionate about sharing my knowledge with the new generation,” he says. It is this passion that motivates Klaasen to blog, write articles, and speak at lighting event seminars about “how lighting can be used to improve and look after the world we live in,” he says.

His own contribution to doing that is made through projects mostly in the area of hospitality, commercial, corporate and public building lighting and residential urban developments. “Good lighting design contributes to more comfortable and pleasant environments, easier way-finding, and beautification of the cities we live in,” he says. “Most of all it is the way we achieve it through our sustainable approach, minimising energy consumption, capital and operational costs. Added value creation through good lighting design.”

Over the years, other people have influenced the direction of the award-winning lighting designer’s life and career, too. “Of course I do admire groundbreakers like Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Philippe Starck,” he says, “but they are not the essential motivators in my life.”

Gerrit van den Beld was, however, such a person. Van den Beld was his boss and mentor at Philips. He taught Klaasen how to pace himself and “how to take things one at a time, sleep on problems rather than react emotionally,” he says. “He was instrumental in forming my lighting design personality.”

Klaasen worked at Philips after graduating with a master’s degree in Industrial Design from the Technische Hogeschool in Delft in The Netherlands. “As I like building and creating things,” he says, “I settled on industrial product design…Industrial design teaches you the process of design, from concept to realisation and till today it has been the foundation of my successful career.”

When Klaasen finished his studies he started to look for a job at Philips, where he had completed his final master’s degree project, which was “designing an intelligent washing machine that could read the laundry and decide the washing program by itself,” he says.

Among the job opportunities on offer to him was one of lighting designer at the Philips Lighting Design and Engineering Centre in Eindhoven.

“I was immediately fascinated by this group of people,” he says, “designing the lighting for Olympic Games, big commercial hotel developments and so much more. I decided there and then on the spot to take this exciting job and never looked back.”

Also making Klaasen’s list of people that have had the greatest influence on his lighting career is American businessman and author Robert Kiyosaki. “He gave me insight on becoming more business savvy,” says Klaasen. “Good designers are not necessarily good business people and I certainly was not when I started my business.”

Klaasen started his own business in 1991, after moving to Singapore in the late 1980s for Philips, who had tasked him to “set up what at the time was called the Support Centre for Professional Lighting in Singapore,” he says.

Experiences and events that eventually motivated Klaasen to leave Philips were an uncertain future at the company and meeting lighting designers Tony Corbett of Anthony Corbett Associates and BAA’s Barry Arnold.

It was only when Klaasen arrived in Singapore and met Tony Corbett did he realise “there was such a thing like an independent lighting designer,” he says. “Inside my protected corporate Philips cocoon, I basically only knew of Philips product and was limited to using their products to design anyhow.”

By 1990 Klaasen’s job future at Philips was uncertain as the company “was going through severe restructuring,” he says. At that time, though, American lighting designer Barry Arnold asked Klaasen whether he was interested in joining him. Intrigued, and because he had been thinking about starting his own practice due to his uncertain future with Philips, he decided to leave the company. However, not to work as an employee of Barry Arnold, but “in a cooperation with my own company [Lumino Design International] which I incorporated for that purpose,” he says.

Things didn’t work out though. Conflicting ideas about how they would be working together meant that Klaasen left shortly after.

Working from home, a few projects that Philips had passed on to him, such as the Sheraton Senggigi Resort in Lombok and the Melia Purosani Hotel in Yogyakarta in Indonesia, and The Raffles Hotel in Singapore, which was in its final stages, kept him going for the first few months.

The company expanded through the 1990s, but the financial crisis in the latter part of the decade drove Klaasen to set up in Perth, Australia, where he bought a stake in a local firm, Lighting Images, eventually taking it over in 2000.

Lighting projects in Perth included the Burswood International Casino’s Main Entrance and Gaming Hall, and the Riverside Drive and Foreshore along the Swan River. Both projects won later IES Australia and New Zealand Lighting Awards.

In 2010 Klaasen decided to sell his stake in Lighting Images—“I could no longer identify myself with the direction we were going, quantity over quality of design, so I wanted to regain full control about the artistic and creative quality of our work towards our client,” he says—and rebranded himself as Klaasen Lighting Design, opening for business at the start of 2011.

Since then KLD’s lighting design work has included the Mandarin Oriental Majapahit Hotel Surabaya; the Eastern & Oriental Hotel Penang in Malaysia; His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth; the Atlas Bar at Parkview Square Singapore, and the recently completed Alila Yangshuo Hotel and Resort project in China.

Having been in the lighting business for so long now means that “lighting has gradually become an integral part of my life,” says Klaasen. “I live and breathe lighting and lighting design now. It is a constant in my life. Certainly, as a business owner you need to have a constant eye out for opportunities, to be alert to trends and technology advances, look and learn from what others are doing. This is not a nine-to-five activity. It is a permanent and continuous part of life. We learn from others, good and bad. Over time you learn to appreciate what others do or learn from what they failed to do. It motivates and inspires me to do better.”

all published articles, Architectural Record, art, lighting

Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda lights up Amsterdam

By Robert Such. Published in Architectural Record.

Although widely known as a composer of electronic music, 42-year-old Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda began working with light as a medium in the 1990s as a member of the multimedia art group Dumb Type. His previous installations include spectra (2004), a brightly illuminated walkway in Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, and a corridor pulsating with strobe lights and red lasers called spectra II (2002) that has been staged in galleries and elsewhere. In these works, Ikeda challenges spectators with audiovisual stimulation: Intensely bright rooms or dead sound chambers create discomforting situations as well as a sense of infinity.

Ikeda recently continued his spectra series at this year’s Dream Amsterdam outdoor arts event in June. With four installations, including a 600-foot-high projection aimed toward the sky and a slash of light on the facade of Kisho Kurokawa’s Exhibition Wing for the Van Gogh Museum, the artist continued exploring the themes of his earlier works, but at a much greater scale.

In Amsterdam, Ikeda worked alongside Philip Rose from the London office of lighting design firm Speirs and Major Associates. “Ryoji wanted to use very intense, pure white light in a number of locations in the city,” Rose says. “People would come across them by chance. The intensity of the light would change people’s perception of these illuminated elements and provide an unforgettable experience.”

Ikeda picked the four Amsterdam sites while riding around the city on a bicycle. In Vondel Park, he and Rose installed five 2-kilowatt floodlights on the floor of the park’s ornate metal Music Pavilion to bathe the surrounding flowerbeds, pond, and trees in an intense white light.

To light Kurokawa’s Van Gogh Museum wing, Ikeda and Rose pointed five Robert Juliat projectors in the museum director’s office in the main building toward the protruding wall of the wing’s boxlike Print Room, painting it in white light. The office was “not directly opposite the illuminated wall,” Rose explains. “Therefore, we were framing the wall from an angle. The line you see on the main body of the museum is a result of framing the wall with light. This line helps define the protrusion from the main body of the museum.”

In the Westergasfabriek, a 19th-century gasworks turned into a park and cultural center by the landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter, the designers mounted 68 narrow-beam projectors on the curved inner wall of one of the former brick gasholders. Walking around the water-filled container, visitors were attracted to its rim to discover the source of the intriguing bright light.

Across town on Java Island—a residential neighborhood in the east docklands master-planned by Dutch architect Sjoerd Soeters in the 1990s—Ikeda set up his largest installation on a 2.5-acre field at the western tip of the island. Arranged in a 5-by-5 grid, 25 narrow-beam projectors illuminated the night sky in a flamelike configuration.

Throughout his artistic career, Ikeda has approached his work like a meticulous watchmaker, carefully controlling all of the visual and aural aspects of his ultraminimalist creations. “I really love to control sound and light—precision is a keyword for me,” he says. He has been able to do that in galleries, but working outdoors meant that color temperature and brightness were affected by weather, air pollution, hardware limitations, and budget restrictions. In combination with Ikeda’s decision to forego his usual audio accompaniment, the results in Amsterdam were less immersive than his previous interior installations.

And yet Ikeda said he had planned not to influence people’s aesthetic response: “If the people don’t hear anything from the artist, they have infinite possibilities to feel, think, experience the installations on their own.” Indeed, by not confounding his viewers with vast, dimensionless space, spectra asked them to reconsider the city beneath their feet. As Amsterdam prepares to build new parks and other amenities to accommodate notable population growth—70,000 units of housing will be constructed over the next 30 years—Ikeda’s interventions inject an intriguing artistic sensibility into spaces that may have succumbed to overuse, and underscore the importance of public space in Amsterdam’s continuing evolution.

all published articles, lighting, mondo arc

Profile of Rogier van der Heide

By Robert Such. Published in mondo arc.

“I don’t do lighting for buildings, I do lighting for people.” Robert Such speaks to the Global Leader of Arup Lighting.

… so says Rogier van der Heide, Global Leader of Arup Lighting. Well known for his glowing iconic works for starchitects and big fashion labels, the Dutch lighting designer takes a people- centric view towards lighting interiors and exteriors around the world.

The thirty-something lighting designer’s current projects vary greatly in scale, budget and prestige. They include lighting the Louis Vuitton Flagship Store in London and the National Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, but van der Heide is also working on more modest, but no less rewarding, lighting schemes.

For a hospital in the north of The Netherlands, he’s looking into how lighting can help patients to sleep better, and thus speed up recovery times—he recently had four operations, so brings some personal insight to this particular project—and how better to illuminate train platforms. Drawing on research that claims people’s perception of time moves more slowly while waiting on a platform, compared to when travellers are on the train, Arup is also studying how weather, perceived risks, safety, furniture design, and lighting could affect human perception in train stations.

And whether it’s eliminating ambient lighting in favour of accent lighting in a luxury bag store, or punctuating a railway platform with pools of light and dark, van der Heide eschews uniformity in lighting. Coming from a musical background, he says it’s “like music that is the same tone for five minutes or an hour.”

Born into a musical home—his parents were musicians—near Amsterdam, van der Heide went on to study the audiovisual arts in Brussels. Before moving into architectural lighting design, he lit the stage in the theatre, but there he found it “hard to establish a close chemistry between the professionals,” he says. Working closely with architects from A to Z on a project, however, he had “more fun,” he says. In the mid-Nineties, he started his own company, Hollands Licht Advanced Lighting Design. The company later merged with Arup and he took up the lead role at Arup Lighting.

Van der Heide says his work boils down to respecting people. “Making 500 lux uniform wall to wall light is not very respectful,” he says. “It’s the same with temperature, humidity and sound. Why do we put people in buildings that are 20 degrees centigrade all the time, 70% humidity and 300 lux of light?” It’s a holistic design view, taking into account all environmental aspects of the building interior, and aims at making people feel comfortable and at ease.

What characterises van der Heide’s work is his collaborative approach in the design process, and putting forward ideas for lighting “embedded in architecture,” he says. It’s not an add-on layer, rather there is a seamless integration of building and lighting. “The boundary between light and architecture is a diffuse one,” he says.

Under the skin of an architectural work, the technology managing the lighting may be complicated and taking a bigger slice of the budget compared to a decade ago, but van der Heide still looks for visual simplicity. He wants people to take away memorable images, and for him, one such memory is the lighting of the old postal sorting centre in Amsterdam. It was “a really good example of good lighting,” he says. It had a frosted

glass facade of white light and “intriguing shadows” reflected in the canal.

To create bonds between people, places and products, he forgoes the use of complicated designs with lots of colours and different lighting effects. “I try to come up with meaningful concepts,” he says, “and then I try to find the most simple way to tell them.” Lighting can “improve the well-being of people,” he says. “It can create something memorable. You go to a place. It could be a piazza that is beautifully lit. And you take home the memory of it. It becomes unforgettable. That is priceless.”

As for the business side of things, van der Heide believes lighting design is a “strategic aspect for the client in their business”. Lighting does more than just enhance the architecture, it can have “a huge impact on the commercial success of the building,” he says, citing the Galleria West shopping centre designed by UNStudio and Arup in Seoul as an example.

On the matter of sustainability, the number one issue today, his opinion is clear: maintenance considerations, energy consumption and ways of minimizing light pollution should be fully integrated into a project. “They should not even be any more in briefings,” he says. “That just speaks for itself.” In terms of sustainability, lighting can affect a building’s longevity. If you make it charismatic and irreplaceable, it’s less likely to be torn down in ten years.

Green-minded to the point that his house runs on wind power, van der Heide also donates to a rainforest carbon offset programme to make up for gas bought through the traditional supply network.

With so much more yet to discover about the way lighting affects people’s health and well-being, van der Heide the humanist is busy working at the forefront of lighting to understand how we can benefit from it now and in the future. And in the process, he’ll make a memory of it, too.

all published articles, lighting, Lighting Equipment News

Profile about light artist Yann Kersale

By Robert Such. Published in Lighting Equipment News.

A mid-afternoon stroll around French artist Yann Kersalé’s garden wasn’t such a good idea. Not if I wished to appreciate the effects of his coloured lamps sheltering beneath the trees that even as we spoke were thinning and dropping leaves onto the path. Beneath an overcast sky, long thin rods sprouting bouquets of white LEDs stood in the shrubbery. They resembled outsized electric snowdrops and are destined for the grounds of the future Museum of the Early Arts in Paris. As the temperature drops, their white light will turn bluish. As the temperature rises, they will become redder. In other corners of the garden, lamps cast blue and green light palely on the underside of foliage. But there was still too much daylight to appreciate anything fully. So we headed back indoors.

Indoors is a studio in the east Parisian suburb of Vincennes where Kersalé has worked for the past 18 years, and where he torches another cigarette with his cigar lighter and rolls out a sequence of coloured crayon sketches on the floor. This is how he begins a project, with sketches. On the walls are more colourful drawings of skyscrapers. The one on the floor is of Jean Nouvel’s Torre Agbar, a futuristic bullet-shaped 40-storey skyscraper for the city of Barcelona. As with all his architecture-related projects, “I’m involved with the architect right from the beginning,” he says. “I’m a co-creator with the architect who enters the competition.” Architects contact him when they have some venture in mind. “I don’t participate in competitions,” he says.

Kersalé kneels, a length of ash falls from his cigarette, he flicks it away and talks about what he has in mind: a tower continuously changing appearance. He’ll achieve this, he says, by painting the building’s concrete shell in red, blue and yellow patches. An envelope of louvered glass panels will soften the effect of 120 computer-controlled light sources, which will create a subtly shimmering patchwork as light interacts with paintwork.

Movement is central to Kersalé’s work, rarely is anything static. He gestures with his hands as he describes the lighting of another of Jean Nouvel’s buildings, the opera house in Lyon. In the dead of night, with only security guards on patrol, two horizontal red bars on the glass vaulted roof signal dormancy. A full house sets the roof pulsing red neon, “breathing,” says Kersalé. “Light,” he emphasises, “gives meaning to a place only at night.”

Registering phenomena of some kind or other and using the data to create dynamic light-based artworks is a Kersalé hallmark. In the case of the Lyon Opera lighting scheme, Kersalé links the building’s internal life to its outward expression. At the Grand Palais in the mid-eighties, he gave the exhibition hall’s roof a throbbing blue-green glow for the duration of an artists’ salon. Inspired by the salon’s theme, “Time”, Kersalé had the halogen-lit roof pulse in time with data received from the Paris Observatory, home to the International Time Bureau (BIH).

He refers to himself as an artist, not a lighting designer. As for art, it opens the mind, he says, and, ”I express what I feel as a human being.” Deleuze made a big impression on the young Kersalé. He paraphrases the French philosopher. “If the philosopher creates concepts, then the artist creates ‘percepts’,” he says. The artist’s role is “to give meaning and to give feeling.”

Le Songe est de Rigueur (Dreaming is a Must) dates from 1986. The temporary installation on a rocky Brittany peninsula, Pointe de la Torche, resembled a collection of miniature lighthouses, giant molluscs even, or perhaps some sci-fi landscape. A dozen 1200 HMI lamps with rotating filters in specially built three-metre long casings shone their thin twitching beams into the night sky and across the water. Kersalé met with oceanographers and used “software which recorded wind speed, tides and currents,” he says. Changes in the captured data, meteorological and otherwise, altered the rotational speed of the filters. As the wavelength of the waves increased, for example, so the filters would rotate quicker.

The central nervous system of a building often holds the vital input that Kersalé needs to realise his kinetic artworks. “It’s as if I were in the brain of the tower,” he says. For example, the hourly changes in frequency of the ups and downs of lifts within a building could switch lamps installed on the façade between blue and red.

When asked to light a Romanesque church in Melle, western France, budget restrictions meant that such a high-tech approach was impossible. Instead, he decided to use a single lamp and a revolving diachromic mirror. The lamp was hung 30cm above the church floor, held by a single chord. “The Romanesque churches have extremely small openings,” he recalls. “In practice, hardly any daylight enters Romanesque churches.” Within this dimly lit interior, the suspended lamp could be set swinging, filling the naves and vaults with pendulous shafts of primary coloured light. “There was this perpetual aspect of time and the rocking of the vaults,” and when the light began moving, ‘there was the impression that the church was pitching like a boat, when the horizon doesn’t stop tilting,” he explains. “The idea was to produce a destabilisation, a dynamic in something static and massive like a Romanesque church. To give lightness to something that is the opposite.”

Although born in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, Kersalé moved to Brittany with his parents early on in life. His schooling took place in Brittany and in 1978 he graduated with a diploma in the plastic arts from the Beaux Arts de Quimper. Workshops, however, wouldn’t be for Kersalé. “I didn’t want to be shut up in an atelier,” he explains, and so took to the theatre, in Lyon. Work in the music industry followed.

Kersalé is vague about how he came to do this or that. It seems that his work mostly came, indeed still comes, from contacts and references. At the beginning of the eighties, he rigged the stage lighting for Culture Club at the Palace nightclub in Paris. His contacts also led him to Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), the Romanian classical composer. During Xenakis’ performance, the composer shared the limelight with a roaming bull — bathed in blue light — in the Arène de Nîmes (the Roman amphitheatre in Nîmes).

Kersalé gained his beaux arts diploma using a methodology that he still pursues to this day: what he refers to as mise-en-abîme (‘embeddedness’, the story-within-a-story, or the picture-of-a-picture-within-a-picture). He started out photographing sand and algae on the beach. These images were then slide-projected onto nudes, which he subsequently photographed — a process that could in fact be continued indefinitely.

Nature is not always a starting point, which I was beginning to think was the case. The street can also be a point of departure, too. In Lightjack, an installation for a Tokyo gallery, multiple projections swung back and forth across a narrow humpback-shaped granite rock pasted with Japanese paper. The projections themselves were photographic fragments of neon signs that Kersalé had shot in Tokyo. The project brought together the traditional and the contemporary, elements that co-exist so closely in Japanese society. Lightjack “establishes a virtual rapport between things and time,” he explains.

More recently, Kersalé has returned to the natural world for his subject matter, packing his digital camera and venturing beyond the Arctic Circle. Relique de la Calotte is the result of that trip (calotte puns on a cap that is worn and the ice cap) to capture the special light of the northern latitudes. Back in Paris, Kersalé projected his beautifully lit arctic images of ice and water onto inflatable balloons, which hung against a black background. They recall strangely patterned green planets in the night sky.

On the walls are planets, but the anticipated night hasn’t quite arrived yet as I sit interviewing Kersalé. Through the back window, though, dusk is silvering the sky. As the late afternoon light fades a breeze sets the leaves fluttering and the LED bouquets twinkling. When night falls, says Kersalé, “we can set out again to discover everything, the world”. It’s time to take another turn around the garden.

all published articles, lighting, mondo arc

Toh Yah Li

By Robert Such. Profile article about lighting designer Toh Yah Li. Published in mondo arc.

One of the first professionals to become a Certified Lighting Designer and regional co-ordinator for IALD South East Asia, Toh Yah Li has burst onto the scene since establishing Light Collab in 2010. Robert Such catches up with the bright light in Singapore.

Currently one of just a handful of Certified Lighting Designers (CLD), Toh Yah Li’s work ranges from simple, low-tech lighting installations made from everyday objects like plastic bags to carry drinks (albeit everyday in Toh’s home country, Singapore) or breath mint boxes and matchboxes to commercial and residential interiors. Toh’s work also includes a Chinese temple and a 46-metre-high glass monument. Work on lighting a casino in Malaysia is also underway. “When I started Light Collab, I never imagined I would actually complete a casino project or a monument,” says Toh.

Toh is also currently the regional coordinator for IALD Southeast Asia, organising events to raise awareness about lighting and to engage the public in thinking about light, its effect on perceptions of space and changing the atmosphere of a space.

“We are also interested in the temporal effects of lighting and how temporary light art contributes to the city and public spaces,” says Toh. One such Light Collab installation, We The Light, was part of the Singapore-wide Torch-Up! programme of community art events for the 2015 SEA Games (South East Asian Games). The idea behind the installation was to explore “the possibilities of involving people and communities in the illumination of sculptures, attempting to defy the notion that a sculpture is an object of visual appreciation.”

Collab, a diminutive of ‘collaborators’, refers to the four lighting designers that work together at the firm. Headed by Toh, the Singapore-based design team’s other members are Nicole Ban and Chua Li Qi. The fourth member of the team, Teruhiko Kubota, works on Singapore projects too, but is also in charge of the Light Collab Japanese office.

Since founding Light Collab back in 2010, Toh has worked in a number of countries across Asia, including Japan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar and Malaysia. Notable overseas projects include lighting a 46-metre-high (150ft) glass tower, the Tower of Light, built as part of the Liberation War Museum and Independence Monument in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

“Bangladesh was a real experience as I never thought that we could travel to such exotic places; as well as this, being commissioned to design the lighting for the important monument of freedom, which is a symbol of light,” says Toh. “This was one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had as a lighting designer, as well as the fact that what you design can impact so many people.”

Along with the lighting of the glass tower, the firm’s first job in Japan was also a turning point in Toh’s career. It was a “flagship terminal of an Audi centre in a very prominent location of Yokohama, Minato Mirai,” she says. “The project was meant to be a showcase for the region.”

For Toh, yet another turning point was when the lighting design of the same building – the Audi Minato Mirai – received an IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) Award of Merit and also a Good Lighting Award from the Illuminating Engineering Institute Japan (IEIJ).

The CLD qualification that Toh holds is relatively new. Five years in the planning, the CLD application process opened in 2015. “Until now there has been no official codified definition of the architectural lighting design profession,” says David Becker, lighting designer and Chair of the Certified Lighting Designer Commission (the CLD governing body). Standardising the measurement of competency among lighting designers, the CLD credential “legitimises the profession,” continues Becker. It also “offers the only international, evidence-based benchmark of lighting design competency.”

Drawing on ten year’s working experience, since graduating from the Hochschule Wismar, University of Applied Sciences, Technology, Business and Design in Germany with a Masters in Architectural Lighting Design, Toh spent around a month putting together the necessary documentation for the CLD application. It paid off and “in a field where almost anyone can say they are a lighting designer without first establishing legitimacy, CLD is a mark of proper distinction,” says Becker.

Before moving into lighting design though, Toh studied architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her initial interest in architecture came partly from “looking at images of the beautiful spaces created by the master architects, and also architects such as Tadao Ando, Antoni Gaudi, Philip Johnson, Mies Van der Rohe,” she says. “The spaces are able to move my heart, because of the way light is filtered or fills the spaces.”

Toh graduated from the NUS with a Bachelor of Arts (Architectural Studies) degree in 2002, and worked in an architectural office in Singapore, until she realised that little attention was being paid to lighting spaces and how the volumes and forms of architecture integrates to give a narration.

Poorly lit spaces were missing something important. “Without it buildings become empty, cold spaces and unfeeling,” Toh says. It was then that she decided to pursue a career in lighting design.

After graduating from the Hochschule Wismar, where she had interned at Stilvi in Athens as part of her studies, Toh joined the Singapore office of Lighting Planners Associates. There, she worked on numerous large-scale projects, such as the National Museum of Singapore and the Peranakan Museum, whose collection explores the Peranakan culture of people of mixed ethnic origins that immigrated to Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore.

Four years later, it was time to move on. Toh taught architectural and lighting related courses at various polytechnics in Singapore. Then in 2010, after talking to Kubota about working together, she started Light Collab. “It happened quite naturally,” she says. Commissioned work came from existing contacts, and “it felt like the right time as well after working with young inspiring students. I was energised.”

Toh also wanted greater freedom to choose which projects to work on and since working for herself, she says: “I can now decide what kind of projects to do. I can try out and test out [things]. Be different.”

Light Collab’s first commissioned assignment was quite different from what she had been used to working on at LPA. Smaller in scale, it involved lighting a house designed by Singapore-based architecture firm K2LD. A referral landed her the job. In fact Light Collab takes part in few competitions. Work comes their way from recommendations.

Since then, work that has come their way includes the firm’s current projects, which, along with the casino, comprise hotels and an office tower in Indonesia, a library in India, and a pedestrian mall in China. What excited Toh about light and lighting back then, when she started her career, still excites her today. She was fascinated by the way “an intangible medium can manifest itself,” she says, “and also affects the way objects [and] spaces are perceived. It is a very magical material.”

And what continues to excite her now is “experimenting with it and finding new ways to use light as a medium,” she says, “and how it interacts and reacts with the spaces, materials and most importantly, people. I am also very fascinated by the way people interact with light and also discover new insights about light, spaces and sometimes, even about themselves, when light connects with them successfully.”

all published articles, Architectural Record, lighting

Nuances in the quality of light

By Robert Such. Published in Architectural Record.

For almost two decades, visual artist Stephen Hennessy has fashioned spectacular custom light fittings for civic, commercial and residential interiors in his home town of Melbourne.

Ranging from freestanding sculptural works to monumental chandeliers of technical ingenuity, Hennessy’s fixtures grace the walls, floors and ceilings of some of Melbourne’s most prominent buildings, such as the Museum of Immigration and Hellenic Archaeology, the Shrine of Remembrance and Port Melbourne Public Library. Other works shine in Adelaide and Sydney.

Hennessy’s move into the field of lighting design began in the late 1980s, when he became acquainted with the architect Allan Powell. With a commission to create a mural for Powell’s Caffé Maximus already in hand, Hennessy offered to design two large lamps for the cafe himself when asked by the architect if he could recommend a lighting designer.

Over the years, Hennessy’s lamps have blossomed in scale. He recently completed a 33-foot-wide circular chandelier – his largest one to date – for the Adelaide Casino. Part of a group of five, it “looks like a jet engine port engine,” he says.

His earliest works were far from monumental in size. Taking his cue from Brancusi’s figurative sculptures and Cycladic Art, Hennessy’s first lamps resembled primitive wooden masks. The curved birch-ply forms hung away from the wall, their sinuous edges casting shadowy patterns around the light fixture. Since then he has repeatedly reworked this idea of pattern-making with light and shadow.

At the start of each project, Hennessy receives a broad-brush idea about the design from the architects. He then proceeds to find “one or two unique discoveries about the interaction of light and materials.” This part of the creative process bears a similarity to the search for a Principal Design Component, as adopted by Italian architect and designer Achille Castiglioni, whose influential work Hennessy admires.

After visiting a proposed site for the light fittings, he begins making drawings and models. “I tend to make many small and large-scale models,” Hennessy says, “in everything from cardboard to aluminum, to see how it works as a sculptural object. At the same time I conduct light-level tests.” Where added precision is required, he turns to computer design software for help. And the outcome of the process can be quite different from what the architects expected.

When the interior calls for it, his work can be sleek, modern and boxy. Functional and built from matt anodized aluminum, Heat Lamp was designed for the Docklands Stadium Medallion Club Restaurant. Meanwhile, formal minimalism recurs in his design for the laminated glass-and-steel chandeliers that hang in the beige, black and cream contemporary chic interior of the Crown Promenade Hotel lobby.

Expressed through the use of cuts, slits, slots and perforations in the component parts of his ever-increasingly complex metal light fittings, Hennessy’s artistic language continues to develop through his experiments with a palette of materials that includes acrylic, aluminum and steel. The materials may be folded, wrapped and woven around the light source. To modify the quality of light, surfaces are sanded and brushed to create “shimmering and sparkling effects,” says Hennessy. The ribbon of brass, for example, that he used to make the lamps for Fidel’s Cigar Club tapers downward “to create an exotic skin, a crazy couture,” he says. “It is exotic without referencing a specific place, using the alluring and wild play of light to direct attention to the object itself.”

Unlike his mixed-media artworks, which deal with the complex issues of meaning, content and form, Hennessy’s lighting designs are intended to have more of a symbolic ‘life-giving’ presence. “The design of objects comes down to a certain amount of function and a certain amount of beauty,” he explains. “I’ve enjoyed delving into industrial design because it’s fairly free from the heavier concerns of art.”

The look of Hennessy’s earliest work was guided by his interest in representational art, and his latest designs possess geometries that abstractedly evoke images from the natural world. The three-tier chandeliers in the Crown Casino on Melbourne’s South Bank bring to mind glowing sea urchins. Hennessy calls them “monstrous jewels.” They lend the lobby and bar area a sense of grandeur. Hoisted into position eight years ago, the chandeliers were Hennessy’s first large commercial undertaking. His designs have since become more ambitious, and he is not afraid to think big. But no matter how great the scale of the work, his lights still manage to complement rather than dominate a space.

Categories