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.”

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.

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.”