The brightly colored concrete and steel structures rise at varying heights up to 164 feet, and support some 200 plant species including orchids, neoregelias, and bougainvilleas. Eleven of the towers will support photovoltaic cells and rainwater harvesting technology, while also venting warm air from the underground cooling system of adjacent conservatories. A 420-foot-long aerial walkway will link two 138-foot-high supertrees to give visitors a bird’s-eye view of the gardens, and the tallest will house a restaurant in its “canopy.”

The $831 million Bay South garden is the largest of three gardens wrapped around a freshwater reservoir in a mixed-use business and residential development called Marina Bay (perhaps best recognized for the architect Moshe Safdie’s three high-rise buildings connected by a gigantic floating deck in the air). The community is pa1t of the Gardens by the Bay development, which stands on about 250 acres of reclaimed land on Singapore’s south coast. Master planned by Grant Associates and Gustafson Porter, both British landscape architecture firms, it features two conservatory domes, 12 themed gardens, and a two-mile-long waterfront promenade.

The garden layout for Bay South is based on the shape of the national flower of Singapore, an orchid hybrid called Vanda Miss Joaquim var. ‘Agnes.’ Andrew Grant, of Grant Associates, says the giant karri trees (Eucalyptus diversicolor) in Australia’s Walpole-Nomalup National Park were another source of inspiration. The karri trees “loom over the surrounding forest to create an extraordinary sense of scale and drama,” he explains, and he set out to design something similarly impressive.

The gardens will open for an advance viewing as part of the 20th World Orchid Conference in November [2011] and are scheduled to open to the public next summer.

www.gardensbythebay.org.sg/

Also helping to nurture the young Hediger’s interest in light were her parents, both teachers, and keen photographers. The Hediger family travelled widely, and through photography her mother and father gave her, she recounts, a “very good schooling,” in visual framing and the role of light in photography.

In her mid-teens, Hediger returned to Belgium to attend high school, but also returned with strong memories of the African light and landscape.

Now a long way from Rwanda, she works out of an office in Tamines, some fifty kilometres south of Brussels, the Belgian capital.

Over the past thirteen years, Hediger has lit a lengthy list of buildings, both historic and contemporary, along with interiors and landscape design works.

Notable career highlights include the lighting of the Dexia Tower in Brussels, Saint Aubin’s Cathedral in Namur and the KBL European Private Bankers building in Luxembourg.

As far as getting into lighting design, it hadn’t been part of some long-term plan. The ambition developed over a number of years. What Hediger is sure about, however, is that she had acquired a sensitivity to light and its impact on people from her life in Africa.

Back on Belgian soil and fresh out of arts school, where she had studied interior design at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc de Liège in the late Eighties, Hediger took up a position as a sales rep for a lighting equipment supply company. The job regularly brought her into contact with architects and designers, which kindled her desire to set up as a lighting designer on her own.

Eight years later, she did just that.

An “objective artist,” is how Hediger describes herself, “always trying to make light work for the place it’s installed in and for the many different objectives—marketing, well-being, architectural, temporary or permanent displays,” she says.

She also has some golden rules when it comes to developing and installing a lighting system. It has to respect people in a lit environment and to take into account energy usage, maintenance and cost.

It should also blend in harmoniously with the architecture, an example of which was completed in September—the lighting of the Brussels head office of the UCM, a trade union for small and medium businesses in Belgium.

Hediger installed colour-changing LEDs on the horizontal aluminium fins that wrap around the glass and metal box-like building. As with her other works, the aim is to “create lighting with light sources well concealed on the architectural elements, so the architectural elements ‘become light’,” she says.

When it comes to lighting an office building, “an emotion is created like that for a logo,” she says. “The lighting of a facade is closely linked to the company’s activities and its brand image. The control of the lighting provides an unquestionable plus for the firm.” Hediger also points out that it affects employee performance in a positive way, too.

Concealing light sources—like any good lighting designer—and using light to enable the viewer to read the architecture clearly are key parts of Hediger’s lighting plans.

Hediger’s adopted working method on a project starts with looking at the materials, the architect’s vision and the reasons behind the architectural concept. It’s then a matter of taking into account the firm’s marketing goals and the local authorities’ broader intentions regarding its architectural heritage. After that it’s a matter of “combining into a coherent whole the spaces, the forms, the volumes, the observation points of the passerby or visitor,” says Hediger.

To light the Baroque style interior of St Aubin’s Cathedral in Brussels, Hediger used mostly 20, 35 and 70W metal iodide lamps (3200 K), positioned high up to uplight the architectural features of the building while remaining hidden from view. Metal iodides (4200 K) lit the black and white marble floor.

On this project and others, at the end of the day there should be a smooth transition between daylight and artificial lighting believes Hediger.

Using building components as lighting reflectors is another noticeable aspect of her work, as seen in the lighting of the Dexia Tower and the KBL European Private Bankers building in Luxembourg.

In 2003, Hediger put forward a plan to light a new glass office tower in Brussels with LEDs. At that time, they had yet to be “taken up and used like today. Nevertheless I knew this lighting technique was the most sensible, the best adapted for this type of architecture,” she says. “It was a novel and innovative idea—lighting a facade from the inside.”

The main idea was to bounce LED light from 220,000 RGB LEDs, housed inside 4,184 LED bars, off the closed window blinds. The LED bars were built into roughly three quarters of the building’s window panes, totalling 6,000, which turned each window into a giant rectangular pixel on an enormous thirty-eight storey high screen, controlled by computer and a DMX cable system.

On another office lighting project, this time in Luxembourg, Hediger used the building’s granite facade as a reflector. For the KBL European Private Bankers building “the artistic concept,” she says, “utilises the 75-by-150-centimetre vertical granite plates as reverberating pixels as LCD screens would do. Eight hundred and fifty independent granite plates allowing for unlimited lighting possibilities. A huge multi-colour patchwork of colours spreading over the various dimensions, sculpting the building’s forms.”

Hediger’s current workload includes lighting several Brussels landmark sites, such as the 15-16th century gothic church the Eglise du Sablon, the eighteenth century listed Quartier du Béguinage, and the Brussels Stock Exchange.

But large or small, the lighting projects Hediger works on always have an element of emotion introduced into them. “My job is to create emotion,” she says. “The work of a lighting designer is to bring emotion to built works, whatever they are.”

http://www.hediger.be/

Q&A with Barbara Hediger

Projects you would like to change:

Although I’m rather proud of the simplicity and the soft lighting in Saint Aubin’s Cathedral in Namur, I would develop a new lighting concept. Through new technologies, I would fine tune the colour and lighting, controlled and measured intelligently, for a subtler reading of the architecture.

Lighting hero

Yann Kersalé, for his artistic vision and his aim of not conforming to traditional rules in lighting, and bending the rules to suit his own vision.

Notable projects (completion date):

Dexia Tower, Brussels (2006 and 2010)

Saint Aubin’s Cathedral, Namur (2009)

KBL European Private Bankers building, Luxembourg (2008)

Current projects (current status or provisional completion date):

Lighting scheme for several sites in Brussels (ongoing project): Porte de Hal; Eglise du Sablon; Pavillons de la Porte d’Anderlecht; Cathédrale St Michel et Gudule; Eglise Sainte Catherine; La bourse; Eglise de la Chapelle; le Quartier du Béguinage; la Place des Martyr; and le Petit Château

Dinant Palais de Justice, Belgium (2014)

Palais de Justice, Namur, Belgium (2014)

Grand Place and train station, Péruwelz, Belgium (ongoing projects)

Electrloux HQ, Zaventem, Belgium (mid-September 2011)

Dolce Hotel La Hulpe, Brussels (one day clinic and parking areas) (ongoing project)

Sandwiched between green open spaces and Ørestad, a new city development extending southeast from the capital, the hotel is “out in a big nowhere land,” says Kim Herforth Nielsen, 3XN founder and principal architect, “so it has to be more expressive. We had to add some character to the area with this building.”

The idea was also to shift the visual focus away from the visually unremarkable low-rise Bella Center, a trade fair and conference center built back in the 1970s, towards a more iconic-looking building. Ørestad is “a new place so it lacks energy,” says Nielsen, “yet this building is meant to add some identity to the area, and the Bella Center as well. In the middle of Copenhagen it would have looked completely different.”

Given a limited building footprint and a height restriction because of the hotel’s proximity to Copenhagen airport, 3XN came up with the idea of putting two towers side by side. Tilting and folding the two glass and aluminum structures meant that more rooms could have outward-looking views and guests’ windows could be angled away from each other. As for the triangular pattern on the facade, it “came out from the two angles of the towers,” explains Nielsen.

On the inside, the triangular motif reappears in the shape of wall-mounted lobby mirrors and ceiling lights. Other key lobby design features include a 2,000-square foot [180-square meter] planted wall and a soft-lit color-changing LED chandelier.

Inspired by its surroundings, the curved green landscaping serves as a dining backdrop for the lobby’s mezzanine-level restaurant, one of the hotel’s five restaurants.

With more than 800 guestrooms, Bella Sky also stands out for its niche accommodation offering: On the 17th floor of Tower Two (dubbed the Bella Donna floor), 20 rooms are exclusively for women—from the color scheme to room accessories.

To create a warm, informal and relaxed interior in the restaurants and the 23^rd-story Sky Bar, 3XN teamed up with Swedish design firm Thomas Eriksson Arkitekter (TEA). They worked with natural wood, like ash and oak, warm and cool colors, curvy furnishings—a counterpoint to the building’s angular form—and brought in furniture by Scandinavian firms and designers such as Hay, Arne Jacobsen and Finn Juhl.

“To get customers out there they needed to have something extraordinary,” says Nielsen, “and they wanted something that called for Scandinavian cool design and state of the art Scandinavian architecture.”

http://www.bellaskycomwell.dk/

Since Brassaï really came into his own when he turned to photography, the Hayward Gallery presented over 280 photographs of his Paris by Night and Paris by Day collection as well as works from the surrealist review Minotaure and his suite of graffiti series.

Small fetish and portrait sculptures from the early 40s through to the late 70s demonstrate Brassaï’s search for ‘latent forms’ in seashore pebbles—the resulting shapes sculpted as much by the tools he employed as by his dreams and obsessions.

It was in the mid-30s that Picasso commented that photography could not be wholly satisfying, which prompted Brassaï’s engravings that are gathered under the title ‘Transmutations’. The female form is pared down to a musical instrument, a breast or pelvic curve being all that remains. This use of visual ellipsis places him within the cubist wave, and it was cubism’s leading exponent, Picasso, who requested Brassaï to document pictorially his sculptures in 1932 and then later in 1943.

Examples of  “unintentional sculptures”—close-ups of brain coral, a mangled bus ticket, a fragment of soap, a thimble or a needle—, his brush with the surrealists and the publication of his work in the review Minotaure constitute a significant period in his artistic development. Nevertheless, he stated that his association with this other ism was “a misunderstanding”. In fact “the surrealism of my images was nothing more than the real rendered fantastic by the imagination. I sought only to express reality, as nothing is more surreal,” he once said.

Born in Brasso, Transylvania, Hungary, at the end of the 19th century, Gyula Halász first visited Paris with his father, a French literary professor at the Sorbonne, in 1903-4. Not until two decades later did he eventually step once again onto French soil. Never to return home. Between these two dates, Halász served in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry during WWI, then studied at the beaux-arts in both Budapest and Berlin. He took his first photographs in the spring of 1930 and adopted the pseudonym, Brassaï, in 1932.

From 1933, he took to recording graffiti that he found on cavern and factory walls. Whether comic or macabre, grotesque or sentimental, he described these scratchings and carvings as “nothing less than the origin of writing and nothing less than elements of mythology.” Out of the total number of nine series, four are on view: love, death, magic and primitive images.

But it is for his framing of the daytime world and the darker flipside of the day that he has become best known. A Man Dies in the Street, Boulevard de la Glacière (1932) exemplifies his cold, photojournalistic eye. Time and time again, Brassaï snapped the capital’s hard edge, as in The Fight, rue Saint-Denis, (1931), In a Brothel, Rue Quincampoix (1932) and prostitutes on the once seedy, gangster-infested, but now trendy, with all its tapas bars, rue de Lappe at Bastille. On other occasions, he captured the romance of Paris, as in Lovers in a Small Parisian Café (1932), whereas Walkers in the rain (1935), Steps of the Butte Montmartre with a white dog (1932-1933) and The Prison de la Santé, Boulevard Arago (1930) give instances of Brassaï’s marvellous grasp of composition, light, reflections and atmosphere.

Looking closer I realised that an animated version of a Jules Verne story was playing on a screen. Naive, black and white images danced across it, painting the meagre audience with a flickering, silvery sheen.

Leaning on Montmartre’s southern slope, Studio 28 is one of hundreds of cinemas that will throw open its doors as part of France’s three-day cinema festival a week from now. Known mainly to locals and dedicated cinema buffs, its strange, plant-like decor is, in fact, the whimsical work of Jean Cocteau, artist and film-maker. He designed the wild and colourful lamps in 1948, and today they still wrap around its columns and sprout from its walls.

Studio 28 has always been a showcase for the avant-garde. Jean-Pierre Mauclaire bought its previous incarnation, cabaret club La Petaudiere, early in the last century and, in 1928 opened it as a cinema. Keeping to an innovative programme, the cinema showed films such as Abel Gance’s three-hour epic, Napoleon, to great success. Luis Bunuel’s surrealist, anticlerical and antibourgeois L’Age d’Or didn’t go down so well. Outraged Catholics destroyed the screen along with paintings by Dali, Ernst, and Miro that had been on display.

By that time Paris’ cinematic settings had come a long way from the minimal surroundings in which the Lumiÿre brothers’ showed their first projections; the wooden benches of the Salon Indien at the Grand Cafe on boulevard des Capucines.

In contrast, many of today’s cinemas are disturbingly similar to bland shopping centres and jaded leisure complexes. The truth is that giant multiplexes and US budgets draw big crowds. Although more enlightening works might be chewed over as intellectual fare, the French public, like us it seems, still fall for Hollywood blockbusters. Especially if those films include the homegrown stars, such as Gerard Depardieu, Sophie Marceau and Juliette Binoche.

The architect Kenzo Tange has given Paris its biggest (240 square metres) permanent flat screen, the Gaumont Grand Ecran. Bordering the enormous roundabout at Place d’Italie, south of the river, Tange’s post-modern offices, shopping centre, restaurant and hotel surround an atrium which is capped by a glass, sawtooth roof.

What most people miss by descending directly to the cinema is the arrangement of triangles, rectangles, squares and cubes that form an architectural extravaganza of interlocking steps and terraces up above. The overall impression is of displacement, of the elements having slipped past each other.

Back inside, despite its size, the Grand Ecran manages to invoke intimate cinematic memories. The shiny metal strip in the floor design, the enormous, inflatable Jupiter above and saucer-shaped porch at the rear work together to produce a vivid cinematic flashback to Star Wars.

Fast forward to the real-life search for curious Parisian cinemas and you’ll probably come to a stop by the three-metre high letters which announce the Rex on boulevard Poissonniere. Otherwise known as Le Grand Rex, because of its large screen, this building, with its art deco tower, represents one of Paris’ few remaining “atmospheric” cinemas.

Beyond the plush foyer, filled with deep red furnishings and Romanesque statues, is the auditorium. In 1932, when the complex was constructed, cinema owners scoured the globe for arresting architecture, many turning to South America and the Mediterranean for inspiration. This explains why the Grand Rex of today is a heady mix of Spanish haciendas, minarets and colonnades, complete with a fake night sky.

Foreign films shown here are dubbed, however, so if you don’t want to practise your French, continue on to Les Coulisses du Rex next door. The Coulisses presents guided “Stars of the Rex” tours in English, a happy ending to a flick through Paris’ cinemas.

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.

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.

Walk around a French town or city and you are quite likely to come across a lightscape designed by Narboni. Working with another well-known lighting designer, Louis Clair, Narboni designed the exterior colour-changing lighting of Notre Dame in Paris and is currently implementing his lighting masterplan for the city of Toulouse. His work abroad includes the lighting of the record-breaking Rion-Antirion Bridge in Greece in 2004.

Described as “mysterious and fantasy-like” by Narboni, the lighting of the 2.25-kilometre-long bridge was designed to make the illuminated Greek landmark visible up to ten kilometres away by people living in the surrounding coastal towns.

As the bridge with the longest cable-stayed suspended deck in the world, the structure connects the Peloponnese to the Greek mainland across the Gulf of Corinth. The lighting concept was “intended to create a layering of shadows, relief and texture,” says Narboni. “Lit from below, the pylons gradually disappear into the night sky.” Underneath the bridge, the piles and the sea were left in shadow.

Born in Algeria in 1953, Narboni travelled to France to study Fine Arts. In 1975 he graduated from the Université des Sciences d’Orsay with a diploma in electronics. “I was interested in light – not lighting – in the late Seventies,” he says, “first as a painter and then in the early Eighties as a visual artist. My background was both visual art and electronic engineering, so naturally I found quickly that light was right at the intersection of these two major interests for me.”

In 1988, Narboni founded his own company, Concepto. Working in the field of lighting design gave him “greater freedom and pleasure than in the art field,” he says. According to Narboni, the art establishment in France was and remains still “elitist and not at all open-minded,” he says. “You are in or out, for the art, so-called, experts. You do only art works or you are not an artist.”

Narboni prefers a more eclectic approach to lighting – designing a light installation one day and perhaps the lighting for a fish market the next. And like any creative independent worker he has faced career challenges. He recounts a story about approaching the government for funding in the early Eighties: “I applied to the French Ministry of Culture, Department of Visual Arts, to get a research scholarship to create my own projects with light. And the answer of the jury of the commission was that ‘light is not contemporary enough for Visual Arts.’”

Twenty five years on, and Narboni and France have both come a long way. Now, he masterplans the lighting of the country’s cities. Along with other European cities, Toulouse has adopted a lighting masterplan that aims to enhance the quality of life for its population. Overall, the improved lighting of key buildings, parks and city streets will create a “positive impression on citizens and visitors,” he says.

As a part of the masterplan Narboni built a lightwork across the Garonne River, which flows through Toulouse. A 247-metre-long underwater light strip, made up of 265 1W cyan LED lamp fittings, links the opposite banks of the river at a medieval crossing point called the Chaussée du Bazacle. Designed to draw the public’s attention to the site, the 900W lightwork creates “an unusual, enchanting point of interest after dark,” says Narboni. The blue-green colour was chosen to contrast with the surrounding urban lighting and to avoid distressing the fish.

Around the city, Narboni is using LEDs to light the clock towers of Saint Sernin Basilica and the Church of Saint Joseph. LEDs in ground-level recessed fittings will illuminate three evening promenades, which are due to be completed in November.

The implementation of the Toulouse lighting masterplan has not been straight forward though. “Big changes are not often accepted easily,” says Narboni. Some politicians and local people have questioned his reasons for altering the lighting in the historic city centre, where Ceramic Metal Halide lamps have replaced high pressure sodium lamps. Using less energy, the new lamps provide better colour rendering, and create a warm light that complements the city’s brick and stonework. “The orange colour was awful and very sad at night,” he says.

Making the streets feel safer was also an important aim of the overall project, yet Narboni appreciates that lighting alone will not make Toulouse – which was badly affected by last year’s riots – a safe place. That requires “much more to be improved than light or lighting,” he says.

Narboni believes, however, that he and others working in the lighting industry can help to bring about social change and that it is the lighting designer’s role to think about it. “Light is related to space, to perception, to emotions through the human brain and body,” he says. “It has psychological and physiological interaction with people. The lighting designer has a role to play about that, not alone, but with all the others that are involved in this social changes – even with politics, it is our duty.”

Whereas Vermeulen learnt his trade through hands-on experience in theatre and event lighting, Demeester took a different path. He studied architecture. Together, they combine “stage lighting with architecture, as we know both fields,” says Demeester.
Making his name in the temporary lighting field, Vermeulen began to branch out into architectural lighting in 2000, and has since designed interior and exterior lighting treatments for a wide variety of public and private buildings.

The move into creating more permanent lighting works came about when Vermeulen was approached by a property developer to apply his particular artistic sensibilities and aesthetic sense to the production of longer-lasting works. Impressed by Vermeulen’s creations in the entertainment sector, the company “wanted that same look and feel, but permanent,” he says. Putting into practice the professional know-how he had acquired through the lighting of parties, clubs, concerts and corporate events since his teens, he now assumed the new challenge of illuminating spaces such as cafes, shopping malls and towerblocks.

This turning point in his career led to an eventual six-year project to design the lighting for the Dutch city of Ypenburg. Vermeulen’s approach to the urban lighting plan included the use of colour-changing light-boxes on residential tower roofs and neon street-lighting that enlivened the city centre with a “soft and joyful” evening atmosphere.

A year after Vermeulen entered into this new venture, Brussels-born Bruno Demeester approached him with an idea about working together.

Although Demeester had studied architecture, his interest in lighting had already begun to develop early on, when he wrote a university paper on the subject. He completed his degree in 1995, the same year that Vermeulen started up Act Design. Moving from Brussels to the UK, he took an MSc in Built Environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Part of Demeester’s studies at the Bartlett also involved looking at lighting. By 1998 he was doing a three-month stint at Speirs and Major. Later that year he returned to Brussels, and over the past eight years his growing expertise in lighting has taken him from the office of architect, town planner and lighting specialist Jean-Pierre Majot into a freelance position as lighting designer on a number of projects, including private residential work, which he did for the two years before partnering with Vermeulen.

“I had done some architectural projects and declined on a lot of them,” says Vermeulen, “because of no partner to do this work. I started working with [Bruno] first on an ad hoc basis, but soon we were working full time together on all architectural projects. It was a natural fit.”

Sharing the same office space, the partners typically kick off a project with brainstorming sessions that may also involve professionals from other fields, such as product or landscape design. The client is presented with a mix of hand sketches and computer-rendered visuals in order to communicate the lighting concept. “I normally do eighty percent of the concepts of all the projects as lead,” says Vermeulen. “Bruno then does the development as lead. I do again the last phase. We keep each other in the loop on most projects.” On a few other occasions, either designer may take a back seat, working more in the role of consultant.

In the case of the lighting of the Aspria fitness club on rue de L’Industrie in Brussels’ European Quarter, the lighting project was headed by Demeester, before he joined Vermeulen in fact, but the lessons learnt from lighting the Aspria interior are today being implemented in a current undertaking in Prague, where ACT is lighting the five-star Le Meridien Hotel. The Aspria is “the closest experience we have for that project. It is much focussed on interior design and the quality of the lighting atmosphere,” says Demeester.

The finished Aspria health centre was a £2.9 million (€4.2 million) refit of a 1960s building by architectural practice Art & Build. Inside, Demeester employed mostly uplighting to complement the warm and cool tones of materials such as concrete, plaster and wood. “The fitness rooms, the cloakrooms and the swimming pool are all uplit,” he says. “This general lighting being supplemented with downlights if required.” The illumination of a curved wall, which slices up through two floors to appear in both the centre’s fitness room and swimming pool on the floor above, was given a dynamic lighting treatment. Eight CDM-T 150W colour-changing Studio Due Minicity projectors wash the wall in vibrant colours on both floors.

Lighting Le Meridien in the capital of the Czech Republic, ACT will be focusing on making “people feel comfortable as if they are at home but also add excitement and some magic,” says Demeester. When completed in 2009, the hotel will offer the public a chance to experience a little of that lighting magic; but as ACT has already lit interiors and exteriors in Las Vegas, Paris and numerous European cities, the opportunity for an uplifting experience could be much closer than you imagine.