A liveable world?
Bandung- Singapore, 7th May 2014
Before returning to Singapore I spent some time to assess the progress of the works on site. Discussing in meetings is one thing but physically looking at what is going on is another story. Our meeting place a bit further up the road from the actual site, we can see the building in the distance…The client keeps saying some works on site are nearly completed, that we can’t change anything etc., but on closer inspection on site the soup is not eaten as hot as it is being served as the saying goes. It appears there is still a lot of room to move things around. Ceilings are not all closed up as was being said, wall and column claddings have still some time ahead before they get done, so even the proposal of some extra wall sconces can still be executed without upsetting the construction schedule.
Anyhow the whole schedule seems to be a bit of a castle in the clouds. When I got into this project earlier this year the target completion date was give as 6 months from then sometimes inn September, but new consultants (signage, security, etc) are still been added to the team all with added impact in relation to changes required. Specifically security guys I feel are upsetting, with all the terrorism going on in the world it feels like there is a undue pressure expressed by them to make sure all is safe and secure sometime bordering to the extreme if you ask me…point is however that operators, in order to secure corporate guests, need to thick all the security boxes to be maintained on the accepted list of venues, such is nowadays the demand of the corporate world, not in the least spurred by these security consultants. And it affects lighting too! Need to see this, need to have enough lighting level there…really? What world are we living in? Is it still a liveable world? It seems to be dictated by security and sustainability nowadays…no more room for just a simple human environment to enjoy 🙁
Light Watch 5-76: I woke up to a beautiful sunrise striking my bed…here are some images of the day…the projects we work on are indelibly linked to the country and the culture they are in…
Marking up
Bandung, 6th May 2014
Bandung today and tomorrow; a lovely little city (well, a few million people, third biggest city in Indonesia I am told!) nestled in the hills with a much nicer and cooler climate then Jakarta. The project I m working on is one where I for once don’t really need to produce anything other them my professional recommendations by simply marking up drawings produced by the in-house architect. Of course my fees are equally lower since I do not have intensive submission packages to produce.
But it is a strange position as the challenge here is to define responsibility. As I am not producing any technical documentation, my role is purely advisory and in the end whether they execute my recommendations or not is not really my problem…or is it? As an added complication there do not seem to be any coordinated ceiling plans (yet). On top of that it seems site is already moving forward with closing out the ceilings (based on some old MEP layout plans) so I wonder in how far any of my recommendations will be able to be implemented. As always lighting (consultancy) seems to be at the bottom end of the initial requirements and now that the hotel operator insisted in getting us on board to salvage whatever possible from the engineered lighting design, we are playing catch up all the way.
But truth be told the client does seem to appreciate the recommendations and while he is reluctant to back track on work already done he has indicated that he will implement the proposed changes if it can be done without major delay and additional costs to the program. He did follow through on this when I prepared similar recommendations for the mock up room, so I have good faith that he will do his best to implement whatever is reasonably possible…I for my side do have the pride in my work to care that it indeed will happen and will follow through with the site team to give any assistance as needed. But in the end this project is fairly relaxed as he can either heed or disregard my advice…
Light Watch 5-75: Travelling means staying in hotels and sometimes we come across little gems…this one is a cute little boutique hotel up in the hills, no frills, but all cosy with the basic comfort and needs…
60!
Singapore, 5th May 2014
Aged to perfection was one of the birthday cards I received on Saturday…Well I don’t want to claim I am perfect, but age certainly brings along heaps of experience, that’s for sure. I read somewhere a statement saying 60 means 18 with 42 years of experience…sometimes I feel that way! And now that I have reached this milestone (I am now technically retired by the way, according to Dutch law), there is a sense of peace and contentment that has set in. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody; I have earned my stripes and my place in the lighting fraternity among many other great lighting designers. I have earned the right to do what I want…I worked hard for it!
It is a stage where I can focus on maturing my business into a quality service; with a great team that can carry the torch forward. I am still passionate about lighting, lighting design, about my work and keeping myself active to keep my mind alert and up to date. For the longer run I will however pace myself and leave the running to the younger generation in my team. This now is about enjoying what I do (not stressing!) and passing on as much knowledge as I can to those around me. My blog is a great tool for this and has also created a whole community of friends who follow me and share their thoughts with me! Thanks to you all!
While I share these birthday reflections with you, I did have a full on day today to make sure my presentation for tomorrows consultants meeting in Indonesia goes well. No slowing down yet with trips to Indonesia, Qatar, China, Australia and the US planned for the next 4 weeks!
Light Watch 5-74: Having had all my children, my close and dear friends around me on for this occasion was certainly one of the most treasurable things. Feeling surrounded with love and affection beats any material gift. I am looking forward to the next stage of my life, I am certainly still roaring with energy and full of plans! 🙂
Rent-a-LED
Perth, 2nd May 2014
The story of the day at work today has to be about how LED and its lighting manufacturers are starting to high-jack the way we do our business. I met up with a local supplier this morning to discuss some project requirements and we gradually got into a big discussion about the LED Cowboys and how the whole LED tsunami is changing the way we work, the way we look at things when it comes to lighting. When we started to discuss about LED warranty I was told of how property agents are now more or less forced to re-write the rental contracts of their properties to include clauses about LED and its maintenance in case of failures!
LED manufacturers pride themselves about the longevity of their LED systems so when new developments are being fitted out with LED lighting together with 5 to 10 years warranty obviously one would expect not to have to replace any LED’s if you sign a 5 to 10 year lease. In the older days (not so far behind!) the tenant takes care of replacing blown or faulty lamps, for a few dollars it’s done. Now, with the need to replace complete LED fixtures when they fail, you can be up for several 100’s of dollars, so not surprisingly big property agents like JLL in Australia are resorting to inserting specific clauses in the rental contract in regards to the maintenance of LED lights making the owners responsible!
This of course is opening Pandora’s Box! This means that the property agent needs to get the manufacturer/suppliers endorsement on the warranty together with the procedures to replace faulty fittings. But as we all know the LED Cowboys, have 100’s of ways to wiggle themselves out of these kind of situations! First of all does warranty actually mean 5 or 10 years from day of installation or does it mean 50,000 hours? There is a big difference! Then does the warranty accept lights being used 24 hours a day? We all know the small lettering on some manufacturers LED packaging with a disclaimer that the 50,000 hours is with a maximum use of 4 hours a day! How to police that? I will be very interested to see one of these rental contracts which has a LED clause in it! For now it is just hearsay for me but I can fully sympathise with the situation!
Light Watch 5-73: Here are just some applications in and around the house with LED! Have a great weekend! I am off to celebrate my big six-o tomorrow! Cheers!
Test 1,2,3…
Perth, 1st May 2014
Critical for every off the shelf lighting solution is the testing or visual mock up. It has been the subject of many of my blogs and as it is a recurring part of our job I obviously come back on it time and again. Sharing the issues we face may help others (and my-self included) avoid future mistakes. In this particular case we are attempting to create a 50m2 free form illuminated light box made of stretched translucent material. Through colour changing we will create the different moods in the space. While this has been done many times and some companies (like Barissol) have been the leaders in this field, there are many others in the market attempting to create and make money with similar solutions. The point is that 90% of these companies have no experience in integrating lighting in the stretched ceiling and as a result their experience is very crude and on top of that their structural frames are not designed with lighting in mind and as a result once lighting is inserted the structural frames become very visible, unlike the more experienced companies who have clever ways to make the internal structure nearly invisible.
We unfortunately are dealing with a company with practically zero experience in creating internally illuminated, self-supporting stretched ceilings with all the head-aches that comes with it. First to the architect who had to physically tell the company how to build it and secondly ourselves having to advise on how to light it and most of all that it needed access to the lights within for servicing! How did it come this way? Simply because the client went for the cheapest bid and with that basically pushing the responsibility on to its consultants. There also seems to be no pride in delivering a good product from this manufacturer’s side, possibly because they too have been squeezed to their bare bones in regards to the cost. Their only incentive being that we are teaching them how to do it creating a reference project in the process…
Light Watch 5-72: Regardless of all this we did some testing again today as can be seen from below photo’s (note photo’s have a much stronger contrast impact then we see with the naked eye) and we have a reasonable confidence it will all turn out well. The thing is right now the space has nothing and anything we put in there will be an improvement and while we see every fault and defect, the general public later will probably enjoy it without being aware of all the little things that could have been done so much better…
Extravagance
Perth, 30th April 2014
Contractors (and suppliers) are a strange breed of people…somehow they and certainly the more experienced ones, have a knack for quoting in extravagance when they feel that you are in a squeeze when it comes to time. I am reviewing contractor tender quotes for one of our projects and because the project will be done as a turnkey project, I am reviewing the lighting as included (you may say hidden) inside the overall main contractor bid. There are four of them bidding and each of them has worked with this client before and hence you may assume each of them is familiar with the “rules of the game”.
What is at times difficult to comprehend is that one contractor quotes say $200 for a light fitting and then the next quotes for the $1000. It is that extreme…and all that for as specified items; so how to make sense of that? Same product but quoted at 5 x times the difference in price! In general there are two main factors that are at the root of these high prices. One is the possible unfamiliarity of the contractor with the product and its installation, so they cover themselves by upping the price a couple of times, because in general once they quote there is no way back later on, once appointed they generally can not ask for additional fees as the tender clearly specifies that they are deemed to understand the nature of the work.
The other reason is protectionism not by the contractor but by the supplier they use to source their lights. If this particular supplier is not the agent for that brand, the official agent/supplier may quote him a blown up price to discourage this supply route and get the contractor to buy from them direct. They may in fact be submitting offers directly as well so quoting inflated prices to potential competitors would help them secure the job.
In the process however we get these extremely different bids that for the uninitiated may be hard to understand…that’s where we come in… 🙂
Light Watch 5-70: Some extravagance in new upcoming building designs…
Commercial Heritage
Perth, 29th April 2014
One of my new projects in Perth is the renovation of an old heritage building, currently occupied by a bank (yes, who else 🙂 ). The heritage building has been integrated as part of a corporate tower complex (also owned by the bank as no surprise), however in the new development as there are quite a few in Perth, the old heritage building will be commercialised to and turn to a trendy hub with restaurants, bars and café’s and the like. These buildings are totally in as new destination venues for day and night time entertainment, obviously making much more money to their owners then being used as offices with no revenues.
So there we go…our task is to create a skeleton structure that will be able to accommodate the future tenants and we of course will be in charge of developing the lighting concept. However therein lies quite a challenge. The first and probably most complex is to integrate the lighting within the heritage fabric of the building and while I still have a meeting with the heritage consultant tomorrow I am pretty familiar of what the heritage limitations are considering the interiors and exteriors that we are taking on have a more than a century’s worth of history…both exteriors as well as the interiors are very ornate and the opportunity to touch the ceiling, walls and floors will be very limited. This means we will have to be creative within the existing lighting points and unobtrusive locations in finding our lighting solutions.
The other challenge will be to develop the lighting infra-structure in such a way that it will allow the future tenants to be flexible with the lighting to “tune” it to their needs without really affecting the overall feel and look of the heritage lighting approach. It is likely that we will develop customised solutions with a heritage feel to match the overall space but with modern technology lighting “invisibly” integrated inside. I already have my mind racing with ideas which I will put to the tests in the coming days to see if I can get the whole project team excited…
Light Watch 5-70: Some of the beautiful old details we will have to deal with pictured here during today’s site inspection. Some of the old light fixtures butchered with CFL lamps of different sizes and colours!
Solar mapping
Perth, 28th April 2014
With the move to our new office all gone smoothly in Singapore, I have made my way to Perth to follow up on some work here. On my way I read an interesting article in the Singapore Straits Times in regards to a government funded project that aims to map and analyse each and every rooftop in the island country with the aim to provide a 3D map showing the suitability of the rooftops to harness solar energy. By giving it different colour codes from yellow to red it will give the user (the map will be publicly accessible) a rating of each site. The ratings will be in consideration of the height of the building, the possible shading from surrounding buildings, the slanting of the roofs, their orientation, etc. Daylight models are being created to simulate the shadow forming as the sun rises and sets, all this with the aim to give potential solar power users maximum information about the suitability of their property or possible future property in regards to using solar energy.
The project, which is driven by the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, hopes that this island wide effort to photograph and map in 3D the entire country landscape will stimulate and warm Singaporeans up towards the use of solar energy. The project is expected to be ready for launch by 2016. When ready people will be able to log on, click on the property of their interest and learn how much solar panel capacity could fit on the roof, the power it could generate, what it might cost and how quickly they could recoup their investment. According to the Singapore Government the cost of installing and maintaining solar panels has become on a par with the cost using conventional electricity. The current kilowatt hour price in Singapore is 25.7 cents for conventional electricity tariffs. This is for the general public. Special tariffs are available for big time commercial or industrial users.
I think it is a great initiative and above all a great incentive and help for the general public (even for us professionals!) to quickly understand whether solar power makes sense in a specific project or development! I look forward to see it!
Light Watch 5-70: The Singapore solar panel landscape… The current website already shows what has been installed…
M-Day!
Singapore, 25rd April 2014
Tomorrow is M- Day…after a bit more than 3 years it is time to Move to a bigger and better office. To minimise disruption to our clients we have decided that M-Day should be this Saturday but as you can imagine the organisation has been going on for a while. We had been monitoring the growth of our project port-folio and the related need for staff and space capacity since late last year and at the beginning of this year it became clear that the growth was sustained and that moving was warranted to allow us to keep providing our services to the expected quality to our clients.
Our new office is nearly twice as big with some room for expansion located on the first floor of a typical Singaporean shop house right in the heart of Katong at the East Coast of Singapore. Katong also means that we will be well provided with eating places with the Katong Laksa being its most famous dish. Katong has been designated as the new hotspot in town; a brand new shopping mall opened here last year and both new and renovated shops are sprouting up all the time. We are looking forward and are excited to move to this new trendy area.
Moving undeniably brings along its mixture of stress and excitement with always far more things to handle than you expect together with the necessary setbacks and disappointments to happen despite all the preplanning that goes into it, but all in all we seem to be on track for a smooth move tomorrow. We are putting the last hand to packing; the new office is all done and ready to receive us and become our home in the next stretch into the exciting future of our lighting design practice! Come visit us when you are in Singapore!
Light Watch 5-69: On the move! In many countries truckers go to great extent to put some extra attention to decorating their trucks. In Japan some even illuminate them!
What’s in a lux?
Singapore, 24rd April 2014
One of the most frustrating discussions is when clients ask you for lux calculations…at least when it comes to clarifying a lighting design for mood or ambience…As it happens I received coincidentally a request from two different clients today asking us to carry out lighting calculations to check out the lux levels because looking at our plans they felt that the lighting layout was not covering the space adequately and they were worried to have “dark spots”. OK fair enough, if you do not fully understand the nature of light you may be worried that there is not enough light when you don’t see a lighting point. The thing is that light is a 3 dimensional thing that interact with the architectural space and the material finishes in it.
I try to explain to my client as follows; in a square room I can have one central pendant or ceiling light that will light up the space. It will have the light concentrated in the middle of the room with little focus on what is happening on the walls. Alternatively I can have one down/wash light on each of the 4 walls; the result being that the architectural space is well defined, the materials are well illuminated, the overall appreciation of the room very pleasant. However we may well find that the (average) lighting levels are much lower than with the central ceiling light option. In my case the client had circled the centre of the room asking whether the centre was too dark and whether I could carry out a lux calculation to show him there was enough light!
We don’t design for lux meters I keep saying time and again. A white surface with 100 lux looks brighter than a black surface with 100 lux, yet both have the same lighting level…will the lux calculation really help to get a proper feel of the lighting in that room? Unless you are an expert lighting specialist as we are who know how to interpret lux calculations, we should keep our clients as far away as possible from it….
Light Watch 5-67: As I was looking for illustrations for this subject I stumbled on to the work of Nonotak Studio’s (www.nonotak.com), a collaboration between an illustrator and an architect musician. Their work was created out of a commission to develop a mural in a public housing building in Paris…it just illustrates that lighting and defining a space is not always about lux levels…light is emotion!
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