‘Smart light cities’ – the global movement where digital and eco-ethical lighting is transforming urban environments at night – offers exciting new creative potentials and career pathways for designers.
3 September, 2015
Top image: The Golden Moon, a temporary metal-framed textile structure by architects LEAD, lit with a colourchanging system by LED ARTIST (Teddy Lo) for Hong Kong’s Lee Kum Kee festival
These are surveyed in Davina Jackson’s new book SuperLux: Smart Light Art, Design and Architecture for Cities – which includes photographs of recent artworks by international and Asian designers, including Benoy Associates and Arup, Edwin Cheong, Angela Chong, Michael Lee Hong Hwee, Meinhardt Light Studio, Sun Yu-li and WY-TO (Singapore), Norimichi Hirakawa, Seiko Mikami, Forlights and Nosu (Japan), Laurens Tan (Beijing), Abin Design Studio (India), CMA Lighting Design and Fieldofice Architects (Taipei) and Teddy Lo (Hong Kong).
Mer-veille at MuCEM in Marseille by Yann Kersalé with architect Rudy Ricciotti (photo by Matthieu Colin), pictured on front cover of SuperLux
The book includes summaries of nine new art, design and architectural genres of the smart light movement, which Jackson named to help promote Mary-Anne Kyriakou’s eco-ethical ‘smart light walk’ exhibitions for Vivid in Sydney (2009) and iLight Marina Bay in Singapore (2010, 2012). More than 50 other regular city light festivals are listed – from Diwali to Earth Hour, Lyon and Frankfurt to Gdansk and Hiroshima.
2-22, La Vitrine Culturelle, Montreál, by Moment Factory
SuperLux, published globally by Thames & Hudson, also presents essays by Jackson, Kyriakou and Europe-based scholars Peter Weibel, Vesna Petresin, Thomas Schielke and Peter Droege. Schielke has also created a ‘timeline of luminous structures’ to highlight historically significant light architecture projects since the 13th century. Droege has proposed a ‘SuperLux Code of Energy Conduct’ for lighting designers to specify only renewable sources of powering their ‘wonderful’ light displays.
Code (version 2), a cinema presentation in Beijing by Laurens Tan
The book will be launched with a SuperLux: Smart Light Cities exhibition at the City of Sydney’s Customs House, Circular Quay, 3 September to 17 October 2015. Curated by Jackson with Sydney light architect Mike Day and a Customs House team managed by Jennifer Kwok, it will include imagery of international projects from the book and special lightworks by Kyriakou, animator Damian Gascoigne, and lumino-kinetic artist Alan Rose.
Crystallized, a contoured and colour-changing pixel screen by Andrew Daly and Katherine Fyfe
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