A Healthy Obsession – Mondo ARC

(Extract) A belief in Feng Shui and great shadows are just two things that have helped lighting designer Michael Rohde of German firm L-Plan to become one of the industry’s leading lights. Winner of this year’s GE Edison Award for Residential Design, Rohde has been illuminating buildings and places in Germany and the US since the late Nineties.

Over the years, L-Plan has worked on the lighting masterplan for the Siemensstadt district of Berlin (1999) and the Post Tower in Bonn, for which L-Plan received an IALD Award of Merit in 2004. A year later, the IALD presented the company with an Award of Excellence for the lighting of the Medical Society offices in Berlin.

An architect by training – Rohde graduated from the University of Karlsruhe in the late Eighties – his entry into the lighting design profession was “an accident!” he says. At university, Rohde’s interest had already turned to design, in particular luminaire design, and later, while working in architect Carlfried Mutschler’s office, he acquired the title of ‘lighting design specialist’ – something that he finds amusing now. “I wasn’t at that time at all!” he says.

During a subsequent conversation with lighting designer Hans T. von Malotki, Rohde was advised to pursue a career in lighting. He followed Malotki’s advice, and secured a scholarship from Siemens to spend a year studying Light & Lighting at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture in London. After working as an independent lighting designer for a year he spent the next six years with Siemens, before setting up L-Plan in the late Nineties.

Rohde’s first lighting commission came within a year after graduating from Bartlett. He created a lighting-scheme-cum-installation, entitled “Chlorine”, for a temporary art gallery in London’s Soho. To light the gallery, which was an empty swimming pool, he used blue filters and fluorescents. “As there was no more water,” he says, “I wanted to remind at it, but in a subtle way, as the main purpose was exhibiting art.”

In 1995 Rohde met Feng Shui consultant Thomas Braedikow. They first worked together drawing up a proposal for the lighting masterplan of Stadthagen in northern Germany. They took “a holistic design approach, also considering geomancy and Feng Shui aspects,” says Rohde. “Using light and colour in a new, meaningful way.” Today, Rohde searches for the “Genius Loci – total harmony of light and space,” he says.