PLDC Day 1
Madrid 20th October 2011
PLDC 2011 is on the way! After a welcome party last night on the (windy) rooftop of the Circulo de Bellas Artes building, we officially kicked off this morning with a keynote address from Paul Marrantz, suggesting to us that the Ipad may well save the incandescent lamp, a thoughtful reflection on today’s drive towards energy saving and where we are going from here. The conference program is divided 4 simultanous speaking events, so one needs to make a choice or navigate from from one venue to another in order to listen to presentation of (personal) interest. The 4 subject headings are Lighting Application Research, Lighting Application Case Studies, Exterior Lighting Solutions and Professional Practice issues. Personally the first and the last subjects have my greatest interest, but some case studies are interesting as well.
Unfortunately Paul Marrantz presentation on the lighting of the Burj Khalifa tower was disappointing and in sharp contrast to his excellent keynote address, so I moved to listen to Edward Bartholomew with an insightful presentation on applied darkness. Lighting is as much about lighting as it is about not lighting; light and darkness. I stayed in the room to listen to Malcolm Innes who followed up with thoughts and his research findings on how we perceive brightness in low lighting level environments such as in museums. How we perceive is very much the matter of measuring the exitance levels in relation to colour temperature and reflections of the material environment. As it ended a bit earlier I manage to catch the tail end of Kevin Shaws presentation on the legislation of lighting, set against the failure of many goverments to find sustainable solutions (with qualities accetable to us as lighting designers) in replacing the incandescent lamp. I stayed on to listen to James Benya analysing the situation about making our lighting design profession a regulated and accepted profession…we are on the way but need to reach a state where our profession is officially licensed with a real legal status.
The venue is physically quite challenging as we wrestle our way up and down the stairs (the two small elevators can not cope with the 1000 odd participants!) over the several floors that is being used for the event. The sponsor booths and main lecture hall are on level 2, a prefunction break out space and another lecture hall on level 4 and finally the reception registration and another breakout area with two more lecture halls on level 5…
The afternoon started with the key note address of architect of Hadi Therani (he’s done really interesting stuff with obvious thoughts for day and artificial lighting) after which I selected talks from Koert Vermeulen on the challenges of lighting the Singapore Youth Olympic opening ceremony (which I saw in Singapore), Kai Pippo’s ever-entertaining presentation with advises on how to run your LD practice, to finish the day with Torsten Bauer, who shared his experience in video mapping, a surging trend in the urban landscape. Time for some drinks…
In Light Watch pictures of the evet snapped with my (low res, sorry) Iphone camera 🙂
Light Watch 186: PLDC Day 1
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