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.

architecture, Architectural Record, art, published article

Altering form and sound with movement

By Robert Such. Published in Architectural Record.

Despite its name, Son-O-House is not a house but a permanent public artwork that is both a pavilion and sound installation. Located on the outskirts of Son en Breugel in the Netherlands, it represents the second joint venture by NOX Architects and Dutch composer and media artist Edwin van der Heide. NOX, headed by Lars Spuybroek, first collaborated with Van der Heide on the FreshH2O eXPO pavilion on the island of Neeltje Jans, the Netherlands, in 1996-7.

“I wanted sound that makes people move,” says Van der Heide, who also wanted to move sounds from one part of the building to another, and then record the subsequent movement of people. Physical human movement was also the starting point for the pavilion’s architecture, whose curves are derived from the human body in motion. Spuybroek and his office analyzed the movements of the limbs, joints and extremities of people as they walked around a house, and formed a conceptual model, where paper strips codified the complex array of bodily movements in the house. Three types of cut were developed.

As Spuybroek explains, “When a hip movement,’ for example, “was accompanied by a joint movement, like the flexing of an elbow or knee, the strip of paper was cut down the middle. We then mapped additional foot or hand movements by another cut.” When connected, the flimsy paper strips could support each other. The paper model was digitized and the final arabesque structure made from plasma-cut stainless-steel ribs and expanded steel mesh. The various orientations and the mosaic of stainless-steel panels result in a camouflaged appearance and produce a visual experience that changes with lighting conditions and the visitor’s viewpoint.

Visitors to the 3,229-square-foot interactive Son-O-House must not only stoop to enter some areas of the building, they must also watch out for the uneven concrete floor. As they walk through the space, 24 infrared sensors pick up and record their movements; this statistical information is stored in a database. In the process, 20 speakers distribute shifting acoustic frequencies to create a slowly evolving soundscape. 

People in turn respond to these sounds, some of which are dissonant and repellent, by either moving away from or advancing toward them.

Slight phase differences between sound waves from nearby speakers can produce quieter and louder spots again, in response to the visitors’ movements. Because of the system that Van der Heide has developed, over time effective sounds are retained and sounds that don’t cause movement are eliminated. As a result, people leave behind an acoustic trace of their presence in the building, and returning visitors will share a different acoustic experience. With this unusual structure, architecture and sound join together to offer visitors different aural and kinesthetic experiences. In their second collaboration, Spuybroek and Van der Heide have dramatically explored the relationship between time, place, and the perception of sound and architecture.

published article, 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.