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COULD YOU TELL ME... ... what made you become an architect?
I wanted to become an art dealer/curator and I studied art history for that purpose. Thus I learnt that architecture could be seen as high art, so I opted to try to be an architect/artist.
... how important lighting is to your architecture? I am all for the Corbusian statement that architecture comes to life under the presence of the sun. Artificial lighting is an entirely different thing. I tend to use it very sparsely, and I like to use the building as a lighting fixture, i.e. let the outside be illuminated through the windows, like Kuggen, or through the skin of the building as a light-box, like the House of Sweden.
... what excites you about light and lighting? We did a shopping mall - the K:fem department store in Stockholm - with the lighting designer Kai Piippo, where he introduced projectors that beamed light onto a whitish semi-transparent membrane between the glass roof and the outside. The effect on a cloudy day is the feeling of the sun breaking through the clouds. An extremely happy feeling in the rather overcast northern european skies.
... why spending time thinking about and working with light is important to you?
I think it is important to give something different to any experience. If the sun provides light from above, artificial light could come from a different direction, i.e. below or from the side. To understand the spaces in a different way. To illuminate your mind! In the Spira Performing Arts Centre in Jönköping, Sweden, for example, sunlight enters the building through orange tinted windows. At night, an orange coloured light beams out of the building to light the pathways outside.
... about how you approach lighting a building through architecture, please? Could you tell me about your working methodology? My working methodology concerning lighting is to make it obvious. I like dark spaces where there is a small light somewhere. It is very much the same as a fire in a wood, a torch in roman ruins, at its best, a flicker in the vast emptiness, like the ceiling in the Spira auditorium, with lights which resemble stars in the sky.
... about the role lighting plays in the life of a city? And through your work, how do you contribute to it?
I think light is to the city as blood is to a human. It is the very life. The streets are canyons of energy filled with moving cars, the veins. The buildings are slower, less red. I contribute by responding to this by being louder or usually less so. By being the void... the black hole.
... about the best and the worst illuminated places you have visited? With regards to the worst lighting, how did the lighting fail to achieve what you believe is required in good lighting? I think there are too many spaces with too many lighting fixtures, too many carpets of sameness. I think there should be more rhythm, more with less. It is still possible to visit dark cities in the Baltics, where a single bulb makes a difference. I think there is a waste with too much light today. Not desirable, not sustainable. The latest buildings, like Sven-Harry’s Art Museum and the Hotel Scandic Victoria Tower in Stockholm, they utilize LED lighting. LED is of course more sustainable. Victoria Tower appears to be all glazed, but only a minor portion is, and that means that LED light inside the building just gets out to create a pattern on the elevation.
... about the importance of shadows and the balance of darkness and light in your work?
As you can easily conclude I am a friend of shadows and darkness, of contrasts. The glory of the day stems from the darkness of the night.
www.wingardhs.se
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