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DETAILS Photograph: Jean-Marc Charles
Entirely lit using LED fixtures, the Puilaurens Castle’s lighting combines static white and blue lighting to contrasts the castle’s smooth surface and the surrounding hill’s jagged edges. Inset, Ann Bureau’s watercolour mock-up of the scheme.
Anne Bureau has a difficult time settling on an answer when I ask her who her lighting idol is. “An idol is perfect, but nobody’s perfect,” she says.
She mentions esteemed lighting designer Roger Narboni, her one-time employer and mentor, who she admires because he constantly questions himself, despite being a respected leader in his field. She then considers James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, and though they’re visual artists, they’ve worked with light in ways that Bureau finds breathtaking.
It takes a good 24 hours before Bureau decides on a final answer: Claude Monet and William Turner, both painters. Sensing my befuddlement, she explains: “They paint light. All of their work is about perceiving things in relation to light. If I have idols, they’d be it.”
My benign, somewhat clichéd question is supposed to infer who she models herself after in her own field. It may even flatter
whomever she namedrops. But for her, lighting design is broader than the discus- sions it can get boxed into, so the answer I’m expecting is a terribly moot point. Seeing the bigger picture is part of the reason she went off-brief when she lit the historic Dordogne River quays in Argentat, France, in 2004. “They wanted something dynamic and colour-changing,” Bureau recalls, “but for me, it didn’t make sense to have that kind of scheme with those houses lining the docks.”
Instead, Bureau tapped into Argentat’s own history. Located in the middle of France, the riverside town was part of a trade route coming from the west coast, near Bordeaux, and its docks welcomed myriad wooden barges. “We designed lampposts that looked like the lanterns those bargemen may have used, as though they’d forgotten them on the docks,” says Bureau. “The project is two-fold: there’s the lighting on the quay,
and there’s its reflection in the water.” Bureau sporadically lit up some of the houses’ rooftops rather than their façades, making it less intrusive for residents. She also gave the town the dynamic lighting it wanted, but only on the bridge, and the changes are slow and gradual.
“The lighting is very soft,” she tells me. “It was all done very respectfully.” So much so that it earned her the 2005 Grand Prix des Lumière de la Ville in the Heritage category. Art has been something of a leitmotif throughout Bureau’s 20-year career. It’s even part of her design process, since she paints her mock-ups in watercolour. “I find watercolour works best for showing lighting effects,” she says. “Before, I’d use pencils. But for some time now, I’ve been using watercolour. It can darken better, or draw parallels between water and light. It better demonstrates what I want to do.” The influence of art started at a young age, just as she’d begun her studies in industri-
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