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PROJECT / RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM , THE NETHERLANDS
At the lowest level of the building, the galleries are lighted from circular racks that combine uplighting and exhibit lighting. Photo: Roos Aldershoff
ceilings, and celebrate natural light in spaces such as the Grand Hall (Voorhal). The Antonios liked that, as it seemed a continuation of their ideas for the courtyards that - in their design - were going to turn into spaces lit with ample daylight, covered with lightly coloured materials, celebrating the original intent of Cuypers to create a glorious centre of the museum complex.
How did you then put together the lighting approach? Working at Arup is inspiring and privileged because of the vast expertise you can tap into just by phoning up a colleague. The team in London had tremendous museum experience and it was great to make that available to the Rijksmuseum. Together with Florence Lam, at that time leading the London Lighting Group and now my successor as Global Leader of Arup Lighting, I wrote a detailed ‘scope of work’ that was completely based on the ‘Return to Cuypers’ concept of The Antonios. While Florence developed the first visions on the daylighting, starting with the Gallery of Honour and rigorously working through the whole museum complex including the new courtyards, I connected with gallery designers Wilmotte & Associés to get a better understanding of their approach.
Wilmotte was working on dark colours for the gallery walls, and basically looked for suspended ‘racks’ to accomodate fittings. I thought that, by working across disciplines with Arup’s MEP team, such an element could become the ultimate ‘museum gallery machine’ and include speakers, sensors, smoke detectors and security equipment as well as lighting. Wilmotte liked that idea, of course, as it would mean a much cleaner ceiling, free from all kinds of ‘pimples’. A cleaner ceiling would also nicely support the ‘Return to Cuypers’ idea of the Antonios. But most importantly, the ‘light racks’ would enable us to optimise the angles of incidence of the light.
Could you describe what happened after everyone agreed with the lighting approach? We had numerous workshops and mockup sessions for all kinds of aspects of the lighting scheme. While the daylighting team at Arup in London was busy assessing weather data, simulating integrated daylight exposure in the top level galleries and plotting these data in charts the museum staff and the architect could understand, I focused with the Amsterdam team on electric lighting and started to formulate a vision on the technologies to be applied and a first layout of floating
linear tracks suspended from the ceiling. In retrospect, all of this work has been superseded for different reasons. Partly because of the progress of techology, partly because of changes in the gallery layouts, but mostly because we and the museum staff learned so much from each other that later on we started to think differently about the appropriateness of the solutions. The collaboration with the architects, with Wilmotte and with the museum was not only necessary but also fascinating. It was simply inspiring to work with Igor Santhagens, the museum’s project leader for the fit out, and to get the view of his team on just about everything we were thinking of. The interaction offered us countless conversations that were all equally inspiring, and although the museum was closed during all those years, we often met in the temporary wing with ‘Master Pieces’ that remained open throughout the ten years of renovation. The museum world is - in a way - conservative, and with good reason: one can not take any risks with the artistic treasures of global importance. We therefore discussed an electric lighting scheme that was entirely based on tungsten low voltage light fittings. We recommended that the museum use UV filters and IR filters to control damage to the artifacts.
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