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INTERVIEW / BERNHARD BSTIELER
Right East Central Gallery, Shoreditch, London, 2009 Architect: Dow Jones Architects
Inverse designed a scheme of meandering wires as a primitive electric circuit board to bring light to the artwork locations. Taking a hands-on approach in order to design, test and source the lighting equipment, Inverse specified and sourced lamp holders, wiring, fixing system and aluminum rods that form the adjustable lamp holders to illuminate each work perfectly
Below Wimbledon residence, London, 2007 Architect: Munden Robinson Architects
The exterior of this residence reflects the simplicity of modern architecture with pure forms and clean lines. While the straight lines provide the main visual structure, the elegant curved wall of the staircase helps softening the overall appearance. Buried uplights to the trees, with sodium and warm white metal halide light sources, create layers of light and 3-dimensional appearance of the landscape
Pic: Mark Robinson
design company Isometrix, then and still one of the leading lighting design compa- nies in the UK. Just two years later Bstieler started his own company while freelancing for award-winning Campbell Design (now merged with DPA). Bstieler’s company took somewhat longer to take off because he was doing so much freelancing. After five years, he decided to team up with another two colleagues, Filip and Onur, and founded Inverse in 2006. Many years earlier they had taken part in a competition for urban lighting which they won, but it wasn’t until the founding of Inverse that they got back together as a professional working team. It was a gradual process. Bstieler was at first the only full time participant but they made transitional targets for the others who later became full time. By 2007 they had already submitted and achieved first prize in the Residential category of the UK Light- ing Design Awards.
These days, Bstieler flits between China, India, Dubai, the UK and Thailand. How are things different in Thailand? “The main difference about working in Thai- land,” he says, “is that most of the time it has to be very low cost so it’s not easy to maintain quality of projects... suppliers offer several brands starting with the most expensive. As soon as the budget gets lower they downgrade and of course the quality suffers. The design process is also different. They use lighting design information for
construction without doing shop drawings, so a lot of important details that should have been integrated into the initial design, get lost. This occurs particularly in Thai- land. Even in India and China this problem isn’t so prevalent. So the designer has to spend a lot of time physically on site. Here, we don’t know until it’s built whether the planned result will be achieved or not.” But, “The profession is still quite young here,” he continues. “Despite several new lighting design companies, with Vision Light- ing Design (headed by La-orchai Boonpiti) still being the longest in the business here, most lighting design is still done by the sup- pliers.”
This particular dilemma is not peculiar to Thailand; what does he think about lighting suppliers providing design services? “That’s a tricky one. I personally don’t see it as a threat because at the end of the day they will end up with a scheme where they (the suppliers) use only their own products. So, I get approached by clients who say ‘We want an independent designer to create something unique and choose the right product for the job’. As a result, very often costs are saved for the client because the lighting designers come up with original ideas and offset their creative fees with cost efficient solutions.”
Bernhard Bstieler has a reputation for not shying away from low budget projects, he sees it as a challenge and an opportunity
Pic: Filip Vermeiren
to come up with creative solutions. Some examples are: a refurbishment of a period house in Notting Hill with Sanei-Hopkins Ar- chitects; the East-Central Gallery in London by Filip Vermeiren, another partner in the London office, which received a commenda- tion for its low-cost solution (UK Lighting Design Award 2010 – Special projects). A very recent article in The Economist stat- ed “ ... for those who truly wish to reduce the amount of energy expended on lighting the answer may not be to ban old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, as is the current trend, but to make them compulsory”. How does Bstieler feel about this controversial issue? “It’s too simplistic to just ban all incan- descents. When I first came to Thailand, the first thing I have noticed was that the colour of the light in domestic homes, shops etc is much cooler than used in Europe or the US, even the MIddle East. So it’s not much of an issue here; replacing incandes- cent with fluorescent, because it’s already happened.
“I feel traditionally there is a lot to discover about the lighting preference in different cultures, but very often it is not so easy to back track. In temples they now use lots of fluorescent light whereas in the past they relied on much more ambient lighting compared to times when there was less use of fluorescents. These days natural light is starting to play a lesser role because it’s so easily taken over by artificial light. I
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