034 AUDITORIUM LIGHTING / HARPA CONCERT HALL, REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND


The exterior landscape and underground car park lighting design was carried out by Icelandic engineering firm, Verkis.


Photographs: Courtesy Verkis


order to achieve a lively yet subtle modula- tion, the bricks of the two southern façades are differently inclined, both leaning slightly into the city.” The building’s façade consists of twelve-sid- ed ‘quasi bricks’ made of glass, each about 2.2m high. Surface reflections on and within these bricks create the impression of a volume catching light. The southern façade, which is made up of some 1,000 ‘quasi bricks’, facing the city covers the rough functional building cores like a carpet. These geometric glass structures’ affinity to light suggests the use of artificial lighting to give them a ‘second’ life at twilight and at night – which is part of the concept. The changing daylight and surroundings stage the building in an endless variety of colours. To enhance this effect a special lighting solution has been developed for the front façades using strips of LED colour adjustable lights developed by Zumtobel to individually control the colour and intensity


of each brick. The LED lights are built into the profiles of the bricks to create only minimal visual distraction. At night, the visibility of the lights will vary depending on the position of the viewer and the glass reflectivity in various locations. The lighting for the plain-glass north façades consists of one single white LED light, illuminating the upper half of each structural frame. The intention is to highlight the façade geom- etries against their varied backdrops. In order to achieve the desired interaction between natural and artificial light in the building, the team conducted a thorough analysis of the sun’s movement in Reykja- vik. The artificial lighting concept of the façades thus provides a counter to the changing natural light in Reykjavik. “Over the course of a day, the movement of the sun from east to west will be reflected in the facetted south façades, alongside life in the city,” states Eliasson. “Depend- ing on the weather and the time of day, the


reflectivity and transparency of the façades make explicit the influence of natural light on our perception of the building. Vary- ing light conditions will thus accompany the activities in the house: an opera may be performed in full daylight on a summer night; a children’s concert may take place in the darkness of an early winter after- noon. In order to respond to this natural variety, a number of the quasi bricks are fitted with a special dichromatic glass that each reflect hues of either green, yellow, or orange and their complementary colours. At night, strips of red, green, and blue LED lights, integrated into the bricks, illuminate the façades. The colour and light intensity of each brick can be individually controlled, generating the full colour spectrum.” Extensive studies, backed by Zumtobel’s realistic visualisation tools as well as tests using mock-ups, resulted in linear light pixel elements within the quasi bricks, each of them an individually controlled RGB-LED


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