038
DETAILS [lighting talk]
Each issue we speak to an architect about their relationship with light. This issue Robert Such talks to German architect Max Dudler.
COULD YOU TELL ME...
... what made you become an architect? My family owned a stonemasonry company, but I left my Swiss hometown Altenrhein for London because I wanted to become a rock star. Without any success, of course. I went to Amsterdam where I later met professor Günther Bock and followed him to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. I finished my studies at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in the class of Ludwig Leo. It was him who put me in touch with Oswald Mathias Ungers. I started working in his office to learn more about the process of building and that´s how I became an architect. Now, I love my profession.
... how important lighting is to your architecture? If you look at the Folkwang Library [Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany] for example, we began with the thought that books need light but they don’t like radiation. For this reason we were looking for a translucent material that only lets a warm filtered light shine in. Twenty roof lights spread natural light deep in the volume of the library diffused by membranes. Artificial light can replace the natural light but there is no hard direct light in the building. The most beautiful moment is when a cloud moves away from the warm low winter sun which comes in from south and the whole building is instantly filled with a very beautiful almost material light.
... what excites you about light and lighting?
Of course lighting and the use of light forms the basis of our work, but we don’t want to force it. Even if a whole building is defined by light like the Leuschner Platz railway station in
Leipzig , there is a sense of conceptual rationality. We think light should be rather elemental and not for the effect. In Leipzig, because of the lighting, the railway station becomes a cathedral of engineering. That is of course exciting.
... why spending time thinking about and working with light is important to you?
Apart from the architectural use of light, as I mentioned before, lighting is part of our daily craftsmanship. Lighting can make a building or destroy it. At the beginning of my career I started with a design for a Cafe Bar in Frakfurt . It is very critical for the success of a bar to get the right light in the right amount exactly where you need it.
... about how you approach lighting a building through architecture? A complex process often derives from a very simple idea. We had the chance to develop a table lamp for the Jacob-and-Wilhelm- Grimm-library, so we thought how it would be to stand on top of the terraced wooden reading room looking into an ocean of iridescent lights. Inspired by the atmosphere of ancient libraries like the Trinity college library of Dublin, our antetype was the banker’s lamp of the 1930s, carried forward into an abstract form. The top of the shade consists of a green translucent Brazilian quartzite (ocean wave) which was ground to 2 mm after bonding it on a glass surface. a pleasant glare-free functional light and casts an unbelievable accent light which finds its way through a thousand year old stone.
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