architecture, lighting, mondo arc, published article

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”.

lighting, mondo arc, published article

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.”

architecture, lanscape architecture, Lanscape Architecture Magazine, published article

Monika Gora’s Glass Bubble

By Robert Such. Published in Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Standing in the courtyard of a retirement home for the elderly in the Swedish city of Malmö, Monika Gora’s 35-foot-high (10.5 meters) Glass Bubble provides a warm and fragrant private garden for the elderly residents.

Inside the glasshouse, residents can sit around and chat under the luxuriant foliage growing beneath the curved, glass roof, enjoying the fragrances of plants such as Citrus, Camellia and Magnolia.

Unlike the Mediterranean conditions inside the bubble, the cooler Swedish climate outside supports a variety of plants: Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), Heather (Calluna vulgaris), Sheep Fescue (Festuca ovina), Eastern Teaberry, or American Wintergreen, (Gaultheria procumbens) and other hardies grow in raised peat-and-sand flowerbeds. Gora chose plants that could withstand the wet and cold of winter, and the salt winds rushing in off the Öresund. The Öresund strait connects the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and separates Demark from Sweden.  

Interior and exterior low dry stone walls, as well as the flagstones in the courtyard and the Glass Bubble, are made from a gray, rust-flecked, Norwegian slate.

The bubble itself is made of flat, half-inch-thick (16 mm) laminated glass panels, supported by a stainless steel armature, designed in association with two engineering firms.

Beating off two other landscape architecture practices in the garden design competition, Gora asked engineering firm Buro Happold to design a build-able structure from her sketches and a plastic model. Happold, however, came up with a “complicated mathematical solution,” says Gora. The building wasn’t transparent enough, so she approached Dutch engineering firm Octatube Space Structures. Theirs was an “elegant solution,” she says.

Although single-glazed, which Gora estimates will push average winter running costs up by 30 to 40 percent, the alternative double-glazed design solution proposed by Octatube was “more clumsy,” says Gora. The clients also preferred the single-glazed version. To obtain maximum transparency, the engineers used extra white glass.

“The function of the glass is like a membrane,” she says. “The inside becomes a bubble filled with warmth and life. Full of light and space, protected and quiet.”

This is not Gora’s first bubble-like work. Over the years, she has created a number of rounded structures, such as a glowing, 33-foot-high (10 meters), zeppelin-shaped inflatable in Vienna (1995), the Shining Sculptures (1997) gallery installation, and the 40-foot-high (12 meters) A Drop of Light inflatable in Stockholm (1998).

Aside from satisfying her clients’ practical requirements, Gora’s interest lies in stimulating public debate about the relationship between culture and nature, and about current social, political and environmental issues, through landscaping and exhibiting artworks.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Gora moved to Sweden with her parents in the late Sixties. After completing her studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in 1983, she set up her own company in 1989.

Other recently completed works include six 12-foot-high (3.5 meters) onion-shaped light sculptures bordering a highway on the outskirts of Malmö. Current projects include a hilly landscaped park, using soil from city construction works. Both this project and a children’s play area in Stockholm’s historic Kungsträdgården (King’s Garden) are due to open next summer. For the kids in the Kungsträdgården, Gora has designed light sculptures, a rose garden and a bridge in a playground. While she designed the play area to fit into the historic local context, she points out that it will be “an exciting place for kids.” As with the Glass Bubble and the courtyard garden, it will no doubt set people talking about the nature of place and appropriate landscape responses to making good outdoor space in an urban setting.

art, published article, Sculpture Magazine

Doubts and Hopes. A Conversation with Kent Karlsson

By Robert Such. Published in Sculpture Magazine.

Dreams, memories, politics, history and religion inform the artworks of Kent Karlsson. The Swedish artist works everyday objects and iconic images into sculptures created through an exploration and refining of his own poetic visual language.

Karlsson works out of his hometown studio in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden. Over the years, he has created public and privately commissioned works in urban and landscape contexts, and shown his work at gallery exhibitions at home and abroad.

During the Nineties, he lectured as Professor of Fine Arts at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts, the academy at which he had studied ten years before, and as a guest professor at Japan’s Tokai University.

Among the artist’s notable public sculptures is the Temple of Doubt and Hope near Gothenburg’s ferry port. Commissioned by the municipal developer of the Lindholmen Science Park, a university and business development area, and a nearby residential district, the metal church-like sculpture floats in an inlet in the city’s former Lindholmen shipyard.

The title for the artwork, Temple of Doubt and Hope, comes partly from the ”good,” says the artist, “and bad actions” committed by all religions.

Like a ship at anchor, the perforated stainless steel structure drifts in circles, pushed around by the wind. As solid-looking as nearby buildings one moment, appearing translucent moments later, the sculpture pirouettes slowly against the surrounding backdrop of ships, buildings and natural landscape.

Robert Such: You started out as an abstract painter. What made you turn to sculpture?

Kent Karlsson: Originally I started drawing, everything as long it was simple enough. When I started abstract painting it was because I realized I didn’t understand anything about color. Thus I started to paint only one color, for example red, until I got the red which satisfied me. Later, more colors were added and different phenomena came up. For example, two surfaces, one red and one green, producing a vibrating boundary.

After a while these exercises become boring, although valuable, showing that through color you could build an imaginary room. A room where you didn’t have to show windows or doors to explain, just openings made by colors. From the work with color, ideas come up which I didn’t know how to carry out. For example, New Moon, which looks like an ordinary kayak, apart from that it is made of perforated sheet metal. I do not have the ability to depict such an object with a painterly medium. I do not know how I could paint this in a credible way, except by working in three dimensions, and that’s why I started with objects, and if you like, sculptures. It had a relieving effect on me to use different objects, already there, to mix them to become something else.

RS: What were the other key turning points in your career?

KK: I don’t feel there are any particular turning points. It is an on-going process and there is not much of a difference between drawing and sculpture. Maybe a turning will come if I could make a sculpture of cream, fog or shaving foam. I don’t know. I must say in this context that I never have imagined being an artist is constant, and I would not be surprised if one day I am not able to continue this activity. I cannot take for granted that for all time I will be an artist. Maybe one day there is nothing more to say, and that day I suppose it is time to start driving a taxi or some similar honorable work. I have always imagined this point as a future, and definitely separated from the arts.

RS: The church motif occurs again and again in your work. How many have you sculpted?

KK: I have done four bigger permanent public ones, three in Sweden and one in Norway, and some smaller studio works for exhibitions in museums and galleries.

RS: Why did you choose the form of the church?

KK: It originated during my time in Japan, when the act of terror in the tube by a religious sect [the Aum Shinrikyo sect] using Sarin gas raised a lot of questions. How come that so many young, well educated people were engaged in this extreme organization, whose only purpose seemed to be to kill? Their existence was somehow sheltered by laws about religious freedom.

Then back in Sweden I was invited to a project called “The Art Road”, where several towns together planned to make one installation each, along a distance of around three hundred kilometers [two hundred miles]. I started by reading about the district, and found out about the “Korpela movement”, a religious sect from the 1920s. The sect members were waiting for the Silver Ark, which was supposed to come and take them, and nobody else, to the new Jerusalem. They stood there, naked in the snow, assured that they were the chosen ones and everybody else should die.

A lot of oppression can be executed if you can get people to believe that they are selected. I was fascinated by the human faith, that people can believe in something so strong, and I saw them standing there, naked and freezing and then they had to go home, and go on with their life. I thought I had to give them something—but a Silver Ark? Too difficult. Then I met a man telling me a story about a mirage. He saw the church in another place in the village. Suddenly it became obvious for me—a country church. Silver wasn’t possible, so I had to find something else, and discovered mirror glass, as close in material as possible. The mirror glass reflects, and the surface makes the object change constantly, which is wrong, as it is the environment that changes.

Sculptures that look like churches are about my fascination with people’s urge and ability to believe in something—football, God, poetry or whatever they want to believe in. I doubt many things, and most of all myself. Strange as it may seem, doubt becomes fuel for exploration and the possibility to understand something.

RS: Your wire mesh and laminated glass works play with translucency and opacity. How do you choose your materials? And what do you try to convey through the materiality of the work?

KK: When I worked with mirror glass I became interested in the opposite, transparency, like in the wire mesh. During my work I often reflect upon the opposite of my work or the material I use. I believe the choice of material comes from how and what I want the object to express, or become explicit, and still keep poetry.

RS: Could you clarify what you mean by becoming interested in the opposite? Do you mean you start thinking about the next work?

KK: What I meant is that if I look into a mirror, which reflected my gaze back to me, the reverse is to be able to see through what I am looking at. Or if I worked with hard materials such as steel, how would it be to use textiles or rubber? Sometimes this leads to the next work, but not always.

RS: What aspects of the interaction between material, like the mesh of the floating Temple of Doubt and Hope, and light do you appreciate most?

KK: The elements, the wind, light, water movement, and its ability to reflect light, together with the material, mesh, combined with something that looks like a church in the ‘wrong’ place. But I think it’s light and water movement, which are the most important elements in the changing expression.

RS: Does the church’s architectural form refer to any particular building? 

KK: No, it is just an archetype of a church, as simple and as clear as possible. I like the idea of a room, which you can walk into without paying any fee, taking off your shoes, presenting an identity card or pushing a code, an open room for everyone just to stay in for a while when you need. And you don’t have to declare if you are religious or not.

RS: Are you creating a little utopia there?

KK: It is quite okay for me if the church place appears to be a mini-utopia. Anyway I like your idea of a ‘utopia church’.

RS: You can’t go inside the floating church sculpture. Can you enter the Silver Ark sculpture?

KK: You can crawl into the bottom, but it is not particularly interesting and the place is a swamp with plenty of mosquitoes during the summer months, and in winter there is a lot of snow and ice.

RS: It was vandalized. Were you surprised? How do you feel about that?

KK: I am not sure that it was vandals, perhaps it is moose and reindeer that have protested against the construction in their area. No, I am not surprised or upset. I guess a certain frustration can occur both in humans and animals on a design like this in the desert, which only reflects the surroundings. A single budgie in a cage often sits and talks, pecking at their reflection if there is a mirror.

RS: The Swedish are known for their strong affinity for nature and natural things. Is yours strong?

KK: Not so very strong I believe, but I share my time between city and countryside. My studio is in the suburbs of Gothenburg, and my home sixty kilometers [thirty seven miles] away in a rural area. I like both places.

RS: How important is the location of your outdoor artworks in the landscape? Do you prefer them to be seen from a distance, or discovered as you arrive closer?

KK: Both, it depends, but they have to work both ways in a landscape. The object itself constrains its range.

RS: Are your works on paper a prelude to your sculptures or vice versa? 

KK: No, the graphics are only reminiscences of dreams, which are possible to make something out of.

RS: High-heel shoes, church, sunglasses, hare [rabbit-like animal], and other objects and animals reoccur in your artworks. What is their significance?

KK: They are all everyday objects, except the animals, which are mythical in most cultures. I thought that the design of spectacles was fascinating—two pieces of glass on your head for those who do not have perfect vision. Why I did this object I did not know. Afterwards, I read some of the history behind glasses, goggles or spectacles. History is more fascinating than my objects.

RS: There are many dual combinations of everyday objects, animals, symbols and images in your work. What messages are you trying to convey?

KK: These objects are a part of what I am interested in. For me it is enough that I am interested in them. How come that somebody chooses to wear high-heels? Or why do you choose to smoke? I have no message, only my own interest in objects and symbols carrying some kind of general messages over a long time. It makes me start wondering why and how it works.

RS: But you are inferring connections between them.

KK: Maybe, but I am not sure if there are any relations, except that most of these works are everyday objects, but the uncertainty is attractive.

RS: Mirrors that reflect the observer also reoccur in your work. Are you asking the observer to be self-critical, triggering their imagination, or something else?

KK: I don’t ask the observer. I am just asking myself.

RS: The swastika and Osama Bin Laden appear in your work. What’s the message? Is it about terror?

KK: I’m interested in the kind of signs that have become logos, like the swastika, which was stolen by the Nazis, or the pilgrims’ scallop shell used by Shell, originally a bed and breakfast sign for the pilgrims. Both these symbols are now impossible for others to use. Osama bin Laden’s punishment is to stay in an American female shoe.

RS: Is humor an important ingredient in your drawings, paintings or sculptures?

KK: If you find it so, yes.

RS: So it’s not intentionally humorous?

KK: No, and to me it seems that many of my works have a sad tone. But tragedy and comedy are like the two sides of the same coin I suppose.

RS: How do you see your work fitting into contemporary Swedish art?

KK: I don’t reflect on that, it is up to others to judge.

RS: Are you happy to be called a surrealist?

KK: You may call or define my work however you like. I guess my work sometimes can become surrealistic, sometimes political, but what I wish to do is to produce visual poetry.

RS: When giving titles to your work, and translating them into English, how much is lost in translation?

KK: Sometimes, it is impossible to translate in a proper way. For example “Ättestupan”, the title on one of my drawings, the one with the house with characters in the windows, is the name of the street where I grew up.

Ättestupan is, or rather was, a street that was the last street before the big shipyard, which also does not exist any longer. The same area as the location for the Temple of Doubt and Hope. The street was located in an old suburb of Gothenburg, and was a so-called working class area.

Ättestupan is also a myth about a cliff in the Nordic mythology, where the old and sick were said to be thrown to die. I am not sure anyone understands this in Swedish either. It’s a personal memory. Titles just come up and sometimes I change them. There could be two titles for the same object. However I don’t like to have “without title” on my work.

RS: Giving the title is giving information, telling the viewer about your intentions, your contribution. How is that important?

KK: You are right, to give the title is to provide information, maybe I should stop that and use “without title”, or simply create numbered works. For me it has been a way to remember what I reflect on at the time when I worked with the object. But it has happened, though not often, that I forgot or changed the title and used a new one.

RS: What are you working on now?

KK: At the moment I am working on a public commission about the holocaust. It’s a commission from the Gothenburg Arts Board. The initiative comes from the local Jewish Association, Mosaiska föreningen, and the money comes from a donation, which is responsible for promoting “the city’s embellishment”. It was preceded by a competition between three invited artists including my proposal that won the contest.

In my studio I am working with a grand piano and a door. These works are separate from the work of the public commission about the holocaust. The sketch for the holocaust includes a curved rail [from a train track], children’s shoes, and a lamplight. The materials are bronze, iron and glass.

RS: You have also proposed a new bridge for Gothenburg.

KK: It is not a bridge, it’s a building which in some cases also works as a bridge. An old idea which we have seen in Florence, Ponte Veccio and in Bath [in England].

RS: Will it be built?

KK: No, not a chance, and if so, it would really surprise me. I reacted just to political nonsense talk, and a lack of will from both architects and the local urban office. My sketch was just a way to show if you want to build a so-called “iconic building”, we must think of other paths than a new skyscraper building.

architecture, published article, World Architecture

So Tschumi

By Robert Such. Published in World Architecture.

Between Paris and Disneyland, on a growing university campus, stands Bernard Tschumi’s Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. His trademark industrial aesthetic – which found such popularity at the Parc de la Villette in Paris – is here enhanced with ideas of fragmentation and his insistence that a building be built as a closed system.

The security guard trips the alarm, then shuts the door behind me. I’m in. Inside Bernard Tschumi’s £8m Ecole d’Architecture de Marne-la-Vallée. The Franco-Swiss architect’s building stands isolated on a stretch of road near Cité Descartes, a 1980s suburban new town between Paris and the satellite, Disneyland, east of the capital.

A 15-minute approach on foot from the station passes Dominique Perrault’s outstanding edifice for engineering, technology and management higher education (Group ESIEE): an arc chopped out of the shallow concrete facade slopes away from the road and a traffic roundabout, made of concentric waves of cracked basalt around a sculpture representing the earth’s axis.

Further down the road is Chaix and Morel’s less impressive Ecole National des Ponts et Chaussées (the National Civil Engineering School). At the time of visiting, only the giant restaurant complex opposite and the University of Marne-la-Vallée had been built, which constituted 30 per cent of a developing campus. It is a lonely place, but Tschumi points out, “it doesn’t have critical mass yet, but will when everything is built”.

On first sight his design appears more open than the neighbouring monoliths, with different elevations, and is surrounded by tracts of land, fringed by woodland. So what role did context play? After all, Tschumi had immense freedom of expression here, without straying outside the brief.

“The building is really done from the inside out, as with almost all of them I do. I start from the inside and then it starts through the making of that very large space [which] becomes the focus of all activities,” he explains. This very large space – or ‘forum’ – sits 3.5 metres above ground, to accommodate the car park beneath, and is topped by a glass and steel sawtooth roof, the glazed rake facing north to avoid a greenhouse effect.

Eventually, for this is only phase one, users will enter via an existing south side flight of steps, which presently take visitors up to a temporary glass wall. Remembering that work is only half complete is essential in order to make sense of some of the otherwise strange external and internal logic.

Readily discernible, however, is that the facilities for administration and research, and the media library, are distanced from the nuts and bolts of teaching by the enormous forum, which serves as exhibition space, cafeteria and reception. For Tschumi, this 25 x 90 metre area is ‘unprogrammed’, as it can be appropriated for whatever use the clients has in mind. (At the time of construction the clients were the ministry of culture, which was managing French architectural education – it tends to jump back and forth between the ministry of culture and the ministry of education – and the public authorities of Marne-la-Vallée.)

Dominating the void is a box-like envelope on eight pilotis, which houses two lecture theatres – one 90-seat and one 130-seat – divided by a moveable partition. The top terrace of beech parquet is again ‘unprogrammed’.

Seams dividing up the expanded stainless steel skin do not reflect internal distribution, but resulted from the fact that it was preferable to go with, instead of against, the wave-shaped pattern when cutting, thus putting technical considerations at the heart of its design. “I never work with aesthetic reasons [except
when choosing the type of wood],” Tschumi points out.

Galleries of galvanised steel grillwork surround the forum on three sides, the cool tones counterpointed by the warm glow of perforated beech wood panelling. Seminar and jury/pin-up rooms alternate with the workshops, which extend over two levels; the main deck, mezzanine and central column all in the same ubiquitous light-coloured concrete.

In terms of textures and materials, Tschumi included transparent and translucent glass – frosted and smooth, channelled or plain – and-smooth plaster renderings. Chairs, lighting and all-beech furniture were conceived by him. Metals are milled, polished, or lacquered. Diamond-patterned, lacquered, folded steel wraps completely around the four-storey volume on the south-west corner, going indoors and outdoors, playing with notions of autonomy and inclusion.

Long, inclined stairways link the different levels. That their orientation seems wrong with respect to the present access only adds to the feeling of a poorly assembled puzzle – but only if we forget that it is awaiting completion – which continues on the outside where the dialogue between elements is disjointed. “It’s never a closed system…You never contain it. You always leave gaps, interstices. It’s never about synthesis. It’s always about certain fractures. So that the fractures are generally all intentional. It’s not like Norman Foster who will always try to close the system. I always try to leave it open,” he says.

As the architect known for the bright red follies in Parc de la Villette (1985) in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, which as an industrial landscape of activity breaks from the parks of relaxation of the 18th and 19th century, Tschumi has once again returned to industry and dynamism. “I don’t mind industrial. I’ve always liked industrial,” he says. “Our project starts from the following thesis: there are building-generators of events. They are often condensers of the city; as much through their programmes as through their spatial potential they accelerate a cultural or social transformation that is already in progress.”

Tschumi’s plans for phase two of the building include a glassed in open-air chamber that will give access to sub-level one. People will be able to congregate here out of the wind, in relative silence, and beneath the sky. Also on the drawing board is a 400-seat auditorium and material experimentation laboratory.

And how does Bernard Tschumi feel about the building’s influence on the next generation of young architects? “Winston Churchill said that we form buildings and buildings form us… I studied in an amazing Neo-Classical [one], unbelievably beautiful, by Gottfried Semper [1803-79] and I don’t know if it had any effect on me, except that the spaces were astonishing – but it was Neo-Classical…which is the furthest away from what I do,” he concludes.

architecture, Frame Magazine, hotel design, interior design, published article

Hi Hotel

By Robert Such. Published in Frame Magazine.

The 38-room Hi Hotel in Nice may occupy a narrow spatial footprint, but its cultural reach is far wider, thanks to two hotel entrepreneurs, a young French designer and staff who are knowledgeable about the contemporary arts, architecture, design and music. It is also a place where notions of four-star luxury and comfort are given a contemporary twist.

Painted a pearly white, the shutterless building has undergone a radical change since its days as a boarding house. The fun begins as soon as you walk through the purple-tinted glass door on avenue des Fleurs. Purple, which signifies something “quite spiritual and high class,” says the designer Matali Crasset, is the dominant colour of the hotel. Flanking the ramp that leads up to the front desk are two low concrete walls, which have the shapes of speakers moulded into their surfaces. This is the first indication that music has a central role in the day-to-day life of the hotel. Music, provided by F Communications, the French electronic music label, plays all day and all night, and the bar area is a venue for DJ nights. Caressing the concrete is like stroking silky smooth chocolate, and it leaves a trace of dust on your fingertips. Visitors turn right into the lobby, passing through a cylindrical arrangement of colourful screen prints on unwoven fabric. Further inside, the colours include raspberry red, pistachio green, vanilla white and yellow chartreuse. A mezzanine, stacked with books donated by museums, galleries and publishers, overlooks the double-height bar and dining area. At the far end is the so-called nacelle (hot-air balloon basket). Made of birch plywood, it surrounds you in a light, protective embrace. The furniture is also in birch, with upholstery in skai artificial leather.

For the owners, Philippe Chapelet and Patrick Elouarghi, the Hi Hotel is quite different from their first joint business venture, a three-star hotel and restaurant in Brittany. They won top-notch guide-book acclaim for that, but when the weather and the clientele began to get them down, they decided to head for the French Riviera. “We worked in a château,” says Chapelet, “where it’s ‘Bonjour Madame’, and we made small talk at the table…you play a role…Life’s too short for false relationships that are a pain in the arse.” They considered places like Cannes and Monaco, but Nice seemed like the right choice. It was both working class and bourgeois (it also has a tacky and seedy side), it had a famous name and it had great weather. Travelling in other countries made them rethink what a businessman or a lone traveller required. So, they rejected the need for an enormous wardrobe and a chest of drawers and instead decided to include a goldfish (or red fish in French), as a room companion. The name Hi Hotel evolved from that idea of having a poisson rouge. On the Internet, they read that the red mark on the Japanese Koi Carp was called the Hi. As well as being the widely known one-syllable greeting, Chapelet points out that they want the hotel to attract international clients – thus, hôtel international (international hotel). It also represents hôtel interactive: Windows XP- and broadband-equipped laptops are available 24/7.

Once they had acquired the building and some firm ideas about its contents and service, Chapelet and Elouarghi scouted around for a designer at the Paris, Milan and New York design fairs. “They all proposed what we see everywhere in the design world – a little 1970s. We didn’t want fashion,” says Chapelet. So when the world-class French chef Alain Ducasse suggested looking at designers who had worked under Philippe Starck – they liked Starck – they checked out the petits enfants de Starck (Starck’s little children). Matali Crasset struck them as “very different,” says the Paris-born Chapelet.

Crasset graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure de création industrielle in 1991, which was followed by a one-year stint under the Italian designer Denis Santachiara and five years under Starck. While working with the latter she was the art director for Thomson Multimedia, before becoming the head of the Tim Thom design centre. Since then she has worked in many areas, such as graphics, exhibitions and furniture design. Her interiors include the refurbishment of the offices of Paris-based advertising agency Red Cell and a house near Lake Annecy, France, in 2001.

When Chapelet and Elouarghi saw Crasset’s work, they telephoned to arrange a meeting at her Paris office.

“The brief,” says Crasset, “was very, very flexible… We had a good understanding…From the start, it was looked at from this point of view: change things and throw out hotel typology.” Nine room types were developed. This wide range underlines the fact that “there is not one way to live; there are lots of possibilities,” says Crasset.

Monospace was the first room to take shape. It is divided into three areas, each one using different colours and materials: an invigorating red-coloured sleeping area; a cool white, lounge area with a light wood finish; and a refreshing blue-coloured bathroom with resin floor. The room is not large, but that is not important, says Crasset. ”When you think about comfort, most of the time it’s the [depth] of the foam. In fact, for me, it’s the opposite. Comfort is the structure which allows you to move and to have much more liberty…It’s more about mobility. It’s more about freedom to move…this is contemporary comfort.” As regards her thoughts on ‘luxury’, Crasset’s thinking runs along the same lines. “Luxury is not a matter of materials or cost, it’s more about the idea of space.”

Not every rooms’ spatial layout has been reorganised so radically. White & White, which to look at could be a massage parlour or clinic, has a bed that resembles a table and bath that looks like a bed. Digital has a pixilated decor and Technocorner is dedicated to video and music. Up-until-three-O’clock-in-the-morning brainstorming sessions between Crasset, Chapelet and Elouarghi gradually squeezed out the idea for the ninth room, Strate. Another concept, which was based on a giant wave made of resin, called In/Out, would have been the last one, but it was abandoned. “It was a good idea,” says Chapelet, “[but] it wasn’t strong enough. We wanted to go further.” Going further got them a room in which the glass shower and toilet cubicles each stand on a metal-framed platform, which if considered as a stage, makes a daily activity into a small performance. The stratified colour scheme on the walls signposts different activities and uses of space at various levels – white at the base points to storage, so there is a safe on the floor, and blue at the top stands for dreaming.

The crossover between private and public space in a hotel already exists; Strate breaks down the barriers even further. If there are two of you in the room, there is little privacy. It also makes entering the shower a pleasurable experience for the observer and the subject.

Objects in Matali Crasset’s world are multi-purpose. A poof can be a table. A small padded table can be a footstool. A table top can be a shelf that slots into the wall. Crasset’s work also contains elements of playfulness, or in French ludique. “Ludique means to play, to experiment,” says Crasset. She hopes that Hi Hotel visitors will use the objects they find there as children do with objects everywhere – using them not for one specific purpose but as something to stimulate the imagination and action.

architecture, published article, The New York Times

With Plants Sprouting From Walls, it’s the Chia Pet of Buildings

By Robert Such. Published in The New York Times.

A new apartment building in Montpellier, in the south of France, is designed to sprout vegetation from its walls. ”I want to see buildings that speak about landscape, sensation and feelings,” said Edouard Francois, the architect. When he proposed his design for Chateau Le Lez in 1998, he had to overcome objections from authorities who worried that the experimental building would need extra maintenance. The building’s exterior walls are crushed volcanic rock that will sustain cacti and figs. Half of the apartments are rentals (from $330 to $1,100), half owner-occupied. Many have open-topped wood cabins on stilts from which to contemplate the nearby river Lez. One-bedroom apartments sold for about $55,000, three bedrooms for about $250,000, all before completion last year.

architecture, Domus, published article

Rule breakers

By Robert Such. Published in Domus.

Life, energy and movement are some of the meanings for UnSangDong, the name chosen by Jang and Chang Hoon Shin for their studio in Seoul. Text Robert Such “We want to pursue arch itecture that is free from outdated thoughts, traditional or conservative rules,” says Unsangdong’s (Usd) Seoul-based founder and joint principal Yoon Gyoo Jang.

The name UnSangDong embraces several meanings – life, energy, movement and substance over surface. Headed by principals Jang and Chang Hoon Shin, the firm has spent the past few years designing buildings that have gained the architects international recognition and awards.

In a country where clients and construction companies regularly take over the execution and subsequent modification of buildings – much to the annoyance of the architects – USD has managed in most cases to complete work that closely resembles the original design.

Notable works include Kring (KumHo Culture Complex) in Seoul and the glass, wood and steel office building of publishers Life & Power Press in Paju Book City, a complex of publishing-related companies some 30 kilometres northwest of the capital.

Whereas the Life & Power Press building’s floor and ceiling topography is clearly expressed externally, both Kring’s design concept and its name are closely linked to promoting the client’s brand identity.

Completed in 2008, Kring still houses the show apartments – as well as the exhibition, meeting, performance and theatre spaces – built for the KumHo construction firm.

The building’s name combines K from KumHo and ring, hence Kring. Resembling Van Gogh’s silvery starry sky, the circular pattern on Kring’s facade recalls the pattern used on an earlier unbuilt company head office. “The circles on the facade of the Hyunjin Evervill building do not exist by themselves,” says Shin. “We believed that it was more than patterns. We coordinated inner space and outer surface to connect them closely. Our aim was to form a link between urban icon and brand identity of the company,” he says.

Buildings next up for completion are the Seongdong Culture & Art Centre and a new multifaceted envelope for an existing gallery in a residential neighbourhood. The gallery’s new skin exemplifies an interest in making “urban sculpture”, says Jang, “and exploring new structures, materials and the use of space”. On the outside, it brings to mind USD’s Gallery 303. The Seongdong centre, on the other hand, is just one of a number of green projects the firm has worked on over the years, such as the competitionwinning design for the Youngsan- House at Hansei University.

USD is, however, “more interested in ecoarchitecture, not just landscape”, says Shin. It’s clear that “modern architecture tended to consume lots of energy and destroy nature”, he says, adding that in his view “the analysis of environment and energy would appear to play a key role when it comes to design in the future”.

Along with their interest in eco-architecture, Jang and Shin also work to “translate and mirror the current trend of culture”, says Shin. Contemporary trends investigated include the use of public and private space in the city, explored through group studies and exhibitions carried out at Jang’s own Jung Mi So art gallery. Out of this and other research, USD continues to design structurally lightweight buildings, based on abstract geometry, to mesh landscaped

and multipurpose areas, and to design buildings that reflect social trends in a country undergoing rapid change.

lighting, Architectural Record, art, published article

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.

lighting, mondo arc, published article

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.