086 DECORATIVE & DESIGN / LIGHT ART
James Turrell’s work is often related to architectural spaces rather than being seen as pure artworks. Top Zug Railway Station, Zug, Switzerland, lighting by Zumtobel (Image: Florian Holzherr); Above left Caisse des Depots et Consignation, Paris, France, 2003, lighting by Color Kinetics (Image: George Fessy, Oeuvre Lumineuse); Above right Third Breath skyspace, Unna, Germany, 2009, lighting by feno (Image: Florian Holzherr)
The sublime installations of artist James Turrell remind us that this is equally true of natural light. There is a strength in simplic- ity and directness of approach which is all too often overlooked in contemporary archi- tectural lighting. Just because the potential exists to run colour changing sequences which bombard the viewer with a rainbow spectrum, it is not necessarily the route to beauty.
Jo Fairfax, who refers to himself as a ‘creative practitioner’ to encompass the breadth of his work, conjectures that it is equally important to edit and reduce ele- ments of lighting: “In my experience often project teams do not have the courage to back an artist to the hilt, they play safe and ask for a diluted version of a proposal – by having too much or asking for modifications which can tick boxes rather than respond to a site. I think that if one is quiet enough then it is possible to hear what each site requests. The voice of a site always asks for something – even if it is saying, “please
don’t place anything more here, there is enough going on, try inside the foyer, or the car park, sit down, have a cup of tea and listen....” Kulkarni expresses a similar sentiment: “I enjoy works that give more over-successive viewings. This is about the artist intending to communicate and that those contents are worth engaging with. In the light works that I have enjoyed the most this is often about a radical approach and an unflinching simplicity in delivery.”
The true power of pure light and colour is often more clearly evident in the work of artists who do not concern themselves with function. Artist Dan Flavin pioneered a mechanism by which light can change perception of space. His fluorescent instal- lations not only re-define their environment but also use colour to stimulate emotion and to play with the brain’s ability to define one illuminated colour next to another. Such principles and purity of ambition should be highly regarded aspects of con-
temporary architectural lighting. We don’t have to take a minimalist Flavin approach, but we can learn a lot from his refined use of simplicity.
MacKay Design Studio work with the phi- losophy that peoples’ response to the final installation must be a determining factor in concept development before restrictions such as budget and logistics are brought into play. Having defined the desired re- sponse, designs can be drawn up to create that experience with whatever resources are available.
Having recently completed a commission to produce a lighting artwork for the new City of Coventry Health Centre in the UK, I have been impressed by the openness of Sonnemann Toon Architects and Coventry Care Partnership who embraced the idea that an artist and a colour consultant should be involved in design discussions long before the groundwork begins. In this example the work holds conceptual value on several levels; being a continuation of proportional
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