Design Gossip 10th Issue - Guest Edited by Rob Forbes

Light and Magic
Text & Photos by Rob Forbes

"Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself revelation." - James Turrell

One of the best lighting "exhibitions" I ever witnessed was "staged" on a spring day in a small cafe in Mallorca, Spain. (It could have been anywhere). We were finishing a leisurely lunch and coffee, enjoying the seaside quiet, when a bus arrived and disgorged a swarm of large, loud tourists, thoroughly dismantling the mood both visually and acoustically. We sat waiting impatiently for the check, annoyed by the sudden change to the environment, eager to get away from the tourist invasion.

Suddenly the sun appeared from behind the clouds, blanketing the cafe and patrons in a pattern of vivid light dots that shone through the perforated awning. The atmosphere underwent a complete transformation. Bodies retreated into the background, like deer camouflaged in a forest, and we left the place calm and amused, not irritated. It reminded me that light and its patterns can have a profound effect on any environment. It can change our mood from irritation to tranquility in a second.

We cannot really credit the person who designed the perforated awning as the visionary behind this lighting "exhibition". Many unrelated things (none of which were designed with the intention of creating the dot matrix) coalesced to create the effect. It was an act of nature, a form of lighting design that we often take for granted. Design that it is not in a showroom, not trying to be celebrated as design, is so often overlooked. But it's all around us at every waking moment. Missing its magic is like forgetting to notice the beauty of nature.

Lighting is a design category unto itself. Like music, it is magical and mysterious and sets up a deep primal resonance in us that connects us to the natural world. It acts directly on our psyches, creating and changing moods and feelings. This may be why the experience of viewing the stars on a pitch-black night, or catching a glorious sunrise or sunset, or stirring flames in a fireplace can be such a powerful experience for us. Light runs deep and affects everything it touches.

"The finest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle." - Albert Einstein

Nature provides us with the most amazing light exhibitions everyday and the exhibition is always changing (thanks and kudos to the curator). Architects have been helping us to see the magic of light as far back as we know. I have included photos of some of my favorite "lighting solutions" taken over the years. The first is the Pantheon in Rome with an oculus that brings light to a silent dark mysterious chamber. Another comes from a courtyard in Cordoba Spain and another comes from an interior in Granada. Light and shade patterns from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum, light strips at the Schindler house in West Hollywood, a Turnbull wooden chapel in St. Helena California, a doorway from the Luis Barragan's Convento de las Capuchinas Sacramentarias an Tlalpan, Mexico City, are other examples. Each of these reminds us to consider light and the absence of light, pattern, space, and the magic of our physical world more fully. Architects can be extraordinary lighting designer.

Modern lighting designers are primarily focused on problem solving tasks, i.e. how to make our environments more efficient, comfortable and functional. Fine, but one of the lighting's other tasks might be to rekindle our interest in the character, magic, and elusive nature of light itself. The better designers do this unwittingly I believe. The perforations in the dome of Castiglioni's Arco could have derived from seeing sunlight spots on people or on forms just as I witnessed in that cafe on Mallorca. You cannot really look at Ron Gilad's Wall Piercing without a nod to the ephemeral quality of natural lighting. There are many other examples.

I'm treated to a light exhibition every morning from my apartment in San Francisco. The more dramatic and colorful lightscapes is perhaps the more seductive, but I'm partial to the other one. I see the lights on the buildings and the headlights from the cars and the neon cafe signage and it makes me realize that lighting is all around us in its magical form, if we choose to see it. Light is truly mysterious - even Galileo admits to understanding it "but little".

"Vision, I say, is related to light itself. But of this sensation and the things pertaining to it I pretend to understand but little. Even a long time would not suffice to explain that trifle, or even to hint at an explanation, I pass over this in silence." - Galileo Galilei, The Assayer

About Rob Forbes:

Rob Forbes' career includes work in both the Arts and Business fields. Forbes is best known as the Founder of Design Within Reach and for the vision of a business that has grown into one of the leading retail destination for modern design in the US. In his role there he edited a weekly online newsletter, Design Notes, that covered design broadly around the globe. His interests in design, culture, and the urban environment and his personal passion for bicycles led him to his new venture PUBLIC. PUBLIC is a design based business based in San Francisco with a mission to help reduce our dependency on cars and think more intelligently and artfully about the way we get around and connect with our cities and communities. PUBLIC launched in May 2010 in San Francisco and had become the leading nationwide direct source (www.publicbikes.com) for elegant modern city bikes and gear in the US. (text courtesy of Rob Forbes)

Why Wang Shu

found on domusweb.it
op-ed from New York by Brendan McGetrick
photography by Lv Hengzhong and Lu Wenyu. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.

Ningbo History Museum, 2003-2008, Ningbo, China. Photo Lv Hengzhong. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.


Could it be coincidence that in the same year that the Oscar for best picture goes to a silent film, architecture's top prize goes to a designer who disdains computers and claims "craftsmen are smarter than architects"? Was the Pritzker committee struck with the same guilty feelings that apparently inspired the Academy to, at long last, acknowledge the massive backward leap from Billy Wilder to James Cameron? Is the selection of Wang Shu, a noncommercial, non famous architect, as 2012 Laureate an attempt to absolve architecture of its greed and vanity and restore its self-image as a serious, civic-minded profession?


This is not a good time to be a great architect. Having achieved the rank of b-list celebrity during the boom years, architecture's leading figures now bare the mark of the bubble. The public views them with suspicion; we recognize that architects no longer work for us. Fame has eroded their influence, delivering reverence but draining respect. In a time of crisis architects are not consulted. Despite their sensitivity, their awareness of history, despite the fact that they are at the center of a dozen different professions, even Pritzker winners find themselves out of the loop.

Xiangshan Campus, Academy of Art, 2002-2004, Hangzhou, China. Photo Lu Wenyu. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.


Nowhere is this condition more acute than in China, the land of infinite square meters and claustrophobic schedules. "Architect" is a relatively new concept in the PRC and, having evolved with the process of reform and opening up, the Chinese architect is generally considered an assistant to the policy's main actors, government officials and entrepreneurs. His passive-aggressive role in the erasure of old, idiosyncratic cities and construction of new, generic mega cities, undermines the local architect's credibility and, by implication, the importance of architecture itself.

Since founding Amateur Architecture Studio fifteen years ago, Wang Shu has oriented his practice in opposition to China's epic urbanization. In a lecture last year at Harvard, he explained the rationale: "In the past twenty five years, [China] did an incredible thing... One country with three to five thousand years of history, with such rich cultural and traditional things... made a big decision to demolish it. Ninety percent, just in the past twenty-five years. They do this and then build some new things; they copy from all over the world... It's the professional urban planner and architect who did this disaster. They do this with the government together. And so I think maybe we need another kind of architect."

Ceramic House, 2003-2006, Jinhua, China. Photo Lv Hengzhong. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.


This other architect is Wang's Amateur, a romantic figure inspired by the past, agitated by the present, hopeful for the future, active and independent of Chinese commercial culture. She is experimental and thorough. She's critical of the idea that modernity exists in winner-take-all opposition to the past. In the Amateur's view, Modern is simply a division in a vast catalogue of materials and techniques at the designer's disposal. In one of Wang's key statements, the architect explains the Amateur's output:

Amateur architecture is unimportant architecture. One of the problems of professional architecture is that it takes architecture itself too seriously. Building is more basic than architecture: it is closely associated to contemporary life, it is simple, often trivial. Before I became an architect, I was firstly a literati - architectural design was only my free time activity. What's more important than architecture itself is the cultural atmosphere of the place; what's more important than technology is the brilliant language, norms, and ideas in simple craft construction.

Wang Shu, photograph taken at the Biennale di Venezia 2012


There was once a time — before reform, before the boom — when significant building projects in China were the product of an intimate relationship between craftsman and scholar. They shared a high level or trust and an almost unimaginable tolerance for ambiguity. Craftsmen rendered in physical space ideas expressed to them through poems and abstract paintings. Their primary task was not to produce substance but atmosphere, to manipulate matter in pursuit of the immaterial, and in this effort they exercised broad freedoms to interpret and experiment.

Wang Shu's work is part of this tradition. His Amateur is closer in ideology to the scholars of the past than architects of today. He designs beautiful concepts that result in odd buildings. He makes sketches, chooses materials, defines dynamics, and then leaves the execution to amateurs who reinterpret his vision according to their desires and abilities. "In the construction process, you'll find that the workers have added their own techniques," he once told me as we toured his signature work, the Ningbo History Museum. "For example, they arranged the bricks in a traditional pattern from clothes. I didn't tell them to do this, but they understood how, and they did it." Did he mind? "No. I like this process: you start with a certain kind of thinking, but as it progresses, you can't control the result completely, but the result is still controlled. I think this is very near traditional Chinese philosophy — how to balance nature and human beings' abilities."

Vertical Courtyard Apartments, 2002-2007, Hangzhou, China. Photo Lu Wenyu. Courtesy Amateur Architecture Studio.


Within our current environment of information excess, ever elevating resolution levels, infinite storage space and decreasing memory, there is something about Wang Shu's embrace of imprecision that feels heroic. He is a proxy from the analog past, seemingly sent to earth to remind us that the best way to innovate is to understand the ancient. In explaining his work, he offers poems and references landscape paintings. On a tour, he sounds less like an architect than a guide in a nature reserve. He speaks of valleys, caves, lakes. When we reached the Ningbo Museum's high point, a platform where the building splits into five jagged pieces, he said, "When I designed this, I was thinking of mountains. I couldn't design something for the city, because there is no city here yet, so I wanted to do something that had life."

The fact that the Museum is not aesthetically beautiful - from certain angles it is utterly clumsy - somehow doesn't diminish its appeal. Against the backdrop of the contemporary Chinese city, with its endless articulations of newness, craziness, Westernness, strength and luxury and suffering, Wang's commitment to craft and apparent indifference to commercial sensibilities can feel exhilarating. His is an experiential architecture. It doesn't photograph well, because it preferences feel over look. It can't be rendered because it is low res by design. In Wang Shu's buildings the lines between in and out, dark and light, built and natural blur. In this hyper mediated high contrast moment, when architecture often feels like an extension of set design, he offers stimulating atmospheres instead of impressive backdrops.

Ceramic House, 2003-2006, Jinhua, China. Photo Lv Hengzhong. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.


In some ways, Wang Shu's Pritzker feels premature. There are certainly other deserving designers with longer careers, more influential arguments, more accomplished apprentices, etc. The recipient himself seemed to acknowledge this in his official response — "It's a big surprise. I'm still so young!" But Wang Shu's work amounts to more than a single studio's output. It represents a civilization's cumulative culture, dozens of philosophical and artistic traditions from high and low, many of which have been overwhelmed in China's frantic drive to modernize. Despite the fact that the Pritzker committee made frequent use of the future tense in explaining their choice — "The fact that an architect from China has been selected by the jury represents a significant step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals" — in honoring Wang Shu's work, the committee tacitly acknowledges this cultural legacy and, by extension, China's undervalued contribution to architectural history. It is an inspired choice, one that shines a cold light on the excesses of contemporary urban design and offers the chance for re-orientation.

Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art, Phase 2, 2004-2007, Hangzhou, China. Photo Lv Hengzhong. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.

Five Scattered Houses, Ningbo, China -2003-2006, tea house with earth 1. Photo Lang Shuilong.

Xiangshan Campus, China, Academy of Art, Phase 1, 2002-2004. Hangzhou, China. Photo Lu Wenyu. Courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio.

Decay of the Dome, 12ma Biennale Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, 2010 (Hangzhou, China)


Read full article here.


Brendan McGetrick is an independent writer, editor, and designer. His recent projects include the books MAD Dinner (Actar, 2008), Urban China: Work In Progress (Timezone 8, 2009), and Who is Architecture? (Domus/Timezone 8, 2010). In 2011 he curated 'Un-Named Design' , a component of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, in collaboration with Ai Weiwei. From 2002-2006, he served as head writer at the research studio AMO. He is a DJ in his spare time. He believes music is the answer to your problems.

FLOS Wins 2 Good Design Awards 2011

FLOS is proud to announce the recognition of the Kelvin LED and Light Spring in the 2011 GOOD DESIGN AWARDS in the lighting category.

Founded in Chicago in 1950 by architects Eero Saarinen, Charles ad Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufman Jr., Good Design bestows international recognition upon the world′s most prominent designers and manufacturers for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality, and for pushing the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary products and consumer design.

The Bay Lights - Lighting the Bay Bridge to Illuminate the Arts

The Bay Lights is an iconic light sculpture designed by internationally renowned artist Leo Villareal. This stunning fine arts experience will live for two years on the Bay Bridge West Span, starting with a Grand Lighting in late 2012.






The Bay Lights is a monumental tour de force seven times the scale of the Eiffel Tower’s 100th Anniversary lighting. Created with over 25,000 white energy-efficient LEDs on the Bay Bridge West Span, this ever-changing, dazzling light sculpture will be 1½ miles wide and 230 feet high – viewable from the city’s northeast side but not by drivers on the bridge itself. Shining from dusk to midnight for two years, it will impact an audience of over 50 million people in the Bay Area alone, with billions more seeing The Bay Lights in media and online.
 
 

 
 
The Bay Lights is the brainchild of Ben Davis, founder of Words Pictures Ideas, the San Francisco creative agency that branded the build-out of the Bay Bridge East Span – California’s largest public works project – and continues to serve it daily. Inspired by internationally renowned artist Leo Villareal’s exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, Davis began a campaign to realize this stunning fine arts experience – starting with a momentous Grand Lighting in 2012 for the Bay Bridge 75th Anniversary and continuing through 2014.
 
Leo Villareal orchestrates complex, rhythmic artworks composed exclusively of points of light; his groundbreaking work is part of the permanent collection of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has earned him prestigious international commissions and solo exhibitions worldwide. The Bay Lights will be his largest public light sculpture yet.
 
 


 
The Bay Lights will put the Bay Area in the global spotlight from 2012 through 2014, and especially in 2013, “The Year of the Bay,” which will feature the America’s Cup, the Port of San Francisco’s 150th Anniversary, the opening of the new Exploratorium at Pier 15 and, toward the end of the year, the long-awaited completion of California’s largest civic works project – the Bay Bridge East Span – within days of the America’s Cup’s finale.
 
Cultural alliances have been forged with some of the Bay Area’s most creative organizations: Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Black Rock City LLC, Exploratorium, Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, SF Museum of Modern Art, zero1: The Art and Technology Network, Berkeley Center for New Media, Black Rock Arts Foundation, Friends of the Gateway, Maker Faire, SJ Institute of Contemporary Art, and SJ Museum of Art.

Government agencies including Caltrans, The Bay Area Toll Authority, and the City and County of San Francisco collaborated on a thorough environmental review and have worked to finalize permits over the past year in the spirit of helping to ignite civic pride and highlight the important role Bay Bridge infrastructure plays in our lives.

In Marcel's Place - Marcel Wander's Design Studio

Elle Decor Italia
by Marc Heldens
photo by Mark Seelen

Marcel Wander's new studio in Amsterdam is a horizontal building over several floors.

He spends half his time abroad, and the other half in Amsterdam. Every morning Marcel Anders strolls through the Jordaan area to get to Westerhuis, the building where his design studio is based. It is during these walks through the city that he finds the ideas for his latest projects. He looks inside his soul to find the "burning flame", as he defines his creative mind. He loves working like this and inspiring his team in the process. "My task is also to spread my creativity around", he explains, "which is why I needed a new design office. This horizontally-structured building is perfect for my kind of organization. All the members of the international team work on the same floor, which creates great synergy." The studio is split across two levels, with reception areas on the fourth floor and the beating creative heart of the operation on the third floor. "This space is a very fertile ground", Wanders continues. "The people who work here are important to me and their creative spirit needs total freedom. My studio is like a home from home, and my team is like a family that fills me with energy.

My projects are like puzzles, and everybody makes their contribution: myself, the Marcel Wanders Studio, the various international manufacturers and clients. My work has sometimes been defined as quirky, but I believe it's better described as a "fantasy", because what counts is creating surprise, happiness and innovation. I also have a deep respect for everything that is old. I like working with past and present archetypes from different cultures, because they often reveal wonderful values." When we ask him to talk about his greatest fantasy and his greatest vision, Marcel Wanders doesn't think twice: his fantasy is to design a mosque. Meanwhile, his greatest vision is already coming to fruition: a book called "The World Heritage", a collection of his sources of inspiration and of various archetypes from around the world, all mixed up and captured in photographs.

The Spirited Workshop - Anish Kapoor

Elle Decor Italia
by Paolo Campostrini
photos by Vincent Mercier

Located in an old building in London is the studio of Anish Kapoor. Where things are cut, welded, ground and polished. All focused on the Absolute.

In his workshop, where almost impossible solid engineering takes shape, Anish Kapoor searches for unexplored spaces between matter and light; those metaphysical flashes which emerge from steel when it is polished so rigorously that it seems like liquid mercury and becomes a misshapen mirror (the Cloud Gate in Chicago), where onlookers can discover the face they never knew they had. It is a workshop of solid people run by Kapoor; 15 post-conceptual art labourers who work with him in a large industrial warehouse south of London. "I want them to be agile, in their heads and in their legs," says the Anglo-Indian sculptor of anti-matter. "An idea is worth nothing in itself but only makes sense as the conclusion of a journey of experimentation and work".

After spending just a couple of hours in the workshop, it becomes clear that art, in order to become a spiritual adventure, must first involve the body. Kapoor and his workers use masks because it is dangerous to bring out the soul of matter: splinters, smoke, chemical emissions, acids which peel away even the more resistant surfaces. It is a veritable Vulcan hothouse which supports a construction madness that is attempting to overcome the borders between solids and gases.

In 2012, we will see the highest installation ever constructed: a spiral (the Orbit) which will rise above Olympic London for 115 meters. It is a tower of Babel which, for some, is an anthem for the useless and, for others, is the unexplored, the latest among many works to challenge the static. Works which reveal his obsessions: for red (My red Homeland at Besana, in wax) or for the dragon (The Leviathan for Monumenta 2011, at Grand Palais, in PVC). We, too, have our obsessions, but by getting into his works, we can at least learn to recognize them.