Shop lighting
Shanghai- Sanya 14th August 2013
As I am anxiously waiting if my flight to Sanya will leave on time (or at all) due to this year’s strongest typhoon (Utor) blasting its way between Hainan and Hong Kong I use my time at the airport lounge to write my blog, reminiscing on the day’s events. One of my meetings today was a kick-off meeting on the renovation of two shopping malls that we will undertake, a design that will need to be turn around in 3 months. Quite a schedule, hence the initial meetings to determine the design direction are crucial.
We do not do that many retail projects, though the public areas of a shopping mall often are in our scope of works when part of a bigger mixed development. This time around we have a specific focus on the facade and actual retail areas. Many “older” retail spaces in asia often have the lighting mix wrong; high ambient general lighting with little drama or accents. In my (lighting designers) mind there is a close relationship between theatre and shop lighting, certainly in higher end department stores which is what we are looking at. Shoppers are to be enticed entering the shop and moved along by the attention projected on to the merchandise on sale. This requires a far more dramatic (contrasting) approach to the lighting design. In the older days creating an overall uniform blanket of light was considered “safe” as it would allow to move the merchandise and sales positions around without having to change any of the lighting. Now the focus (literally) is on the merchandise and we hardly focus on lighting the circulation area. It takes care of itself if we take care of the surrounding merchandise on display. There is a further trend to make the light “disappear” from the ceiling to further enhance the experience with lighting nearly solely coming as reflected light from the merchandise displays. This calls for a different mind set and also a different approach in terms of lighting systems, all this of course coordinated with and integrated in the shops interior retail concept.
Light Watch 4-132: Galleries Lafayettes, the famous Paris department store recently opened its doors in Jakarta (Pacific Place). Here are some pics which give you the mood and ambience I refer to. I note that sometimes lights can be explicitly used to create mood and drama as can be seen in some pics…
Hangzhou’s Grand Canal
Hangzhou-Shanghai 13th August 2013
I was originally going to talk about the lighting in my hotel room, which was really bad, but then I went out for my early morning walk along Hangzhou’s Grand Canal and found a more interesting subject to talk about. A few years ago a lighting scheme was implemented by the city of Hangzhou along its Grand Canal and although I did not have the opportunity to see it at night; I only discovered in the morning that I was staying a stone’s throw away, though the Hotel name (Canal Hotel) should have given it away. I guess I was not that alert and spent a good part of my night time in the Lobby, the only place with WIFI. My latest laptop does not come with a cable entry for internet anymore…times have changed we are used to WIFI everywhere. Cable?!
Anyhow as I walked along the canal I discovered the lighting that I believe was designed by Roger Narboni in cooperation with a local supplier Zhongtai. I did attend Roger’s presentation about the project at one of the international lighting events and I can only assume that what I saw was the realisation of his design. Distinctive quality light fittings in locations as I remember from his presentation. My point is that despite an excellent design, a design is only as good as its implementation. I say that to my clients time and again. What struck me most is how quickly a lighting installation disintegrates…I know the installation is not that old but it looked like it could fall apart anytime, specifically the linear LED lighting. While the fittings looked of fairly good quality (I could not really find any brand names, but they looked familiar), it is the installation quality that seemed to be the real culprit. And that really is one of lighting designers great nemesis, the quality of installation. I am confronted with it time and again and more and more I am putting in efforts to involve the client as early as possible in the end stages of our projects. We can all develop a beautiful design, but without a proper budget for good fittings and good quality installation it’s not much worth!
Light Watch 4-131: Here are some mood images from my early morning walk, truth be told some of the light fittings still hold out well (inground tree uplights and the lanterns), but the linear and water side lights are looking in need of some love and attention….
China travel
Hangzhou 12th August 2013
After a long weekend courtesy of Hari Raya and Singapore’s National Day last Thursday and Friday, I am back on the road again. After a long day of travel I have reached Hangzhou for my first stop on my multi-city China tour this week. The site is actually about 1 ½ hours drive away in Anji so we will hit the road early tomorrow morning to beat Hangzhou’s morning traffic jam. I took the early morning flight from Singapore to Shanghai, that was pretty relaxed ( J ) but then had to transfer from Pudong International Airport to Honqiao train station, using subsequently the high speed Magalev train into the city, then the subway to Honqiao to catch whatever first train was leaving to Hangzhou. That is when you realise what a huge stretched-out city Shanghai is! Besides a long queueu at immigration (isn’t it annoying when 4 planes arrive at the same time and there seem to be only three immigration clearance counters in operation! Grrrrr! While it took me nearly 45 mins to clear immigration, I was in the city in less then 15 mins, courtesy of the high speed Magalev. Though nowadays it is a bit of a bummer as it has slowed down considerably. Originally it’s top speed was around 430 km/hour, now for some reason it plateau’s at 300 km/hour…sort of a let-down…it grimly exposed the slow speed of the subway which took me nearly an hour to reach Honqiao station. Another queue at the train ticket counter before we finally got into the last train ride of the day (the speed train from Shanghai to Hangzhou). I did not really check the speed read out but from memory it is close to 200km/hour. It took us 1 hour for the journey. A good time to catch up with my local project director who had joined me in Shanghai for this trip. On arrival the client’s limousine and representative greeted us and battling the evening rush hour brought us to the hotel where we just finished dinner…yes your typical Chinese private dining room with the usual “bottom’s up” welcome toasting…
The things you have to do for your projects! I left at 6.30 am to arrive in Hangzhou at 5.30pm at my hotel at 9.00pm…welcome to travel to/in China!
Light Watch 4-130: Here are some impressions from trains and train stations….I leave the judgement about the lighting to your own thoughts!
Light and commerce
Singapore 7th August 2013
With a (very) long weekend ahead some thoughts about light and commerce. Public Holidays is when retail, events and food outlets try to get hold of the public spending dollars with special offers and promotions. I had lunch outside today and yes they had a special promotion going on. In the end nearly everything is about money, one way or another; in our daily dealings with our clients (I spent most of the day working on our project invoicing!), when you need to get office supplies, food, get from A to B, you name it…it’s all about the dollars and cents.
Last night I received an email in regards to a lighting event I am invited to attend later in the year, but reading through the email it became clear that again quality was going to lose out against the quantity, in this case the profit that the organisers whish to make at the expense of organising a high quality event that would beg for a repeat next year. Most of it is due to short term thinking; we make the money first and see later. That is a shame as building long term relationships with clients to me is of far more value than short term profit. What is the point of seeing a client once after having extorting him or her all possible money? A happy client will come back to you time and again. Yes you may make a little less money the first time around, but that (with good work and delivery) is than followed with many follow up work. One of my clients asked me today as we are about to sign of a new project contract whether the quantity of renderings we had listed we would produce was the grand total or the total per area. While it was intended as the grand total, I applied the customer builder attitude letting her know that we would make more at no extra costs if reasonably required I created a happy customer in return.
It’s all about sell, sell, sell but the good sales people think in long term commerce, the bad ones in short term profits…
Light Watch 4-129: Leo Messi is known as a humble person where his actions speak more than his words. The multi-times world soccer player of the year still succumbs to commerce lending his persona to advertise his own branded soccer boots. In this add (called the speed of light) he becomes invisible letting his feet do the action… this time with the help of no less than LED lighting…enjoyable and to me totally measured towards his image. No words, but quality action! But still commerce…
Work and religion
Singapore 6th August 2013
This is of course a sensitive topic, but with Ramadan coming to an end tomorrow, it is very actual and made me wandering about with some thoughts about this. Personally I don’t have any issue with religion, everyone is free to think and believe what they want. In my family I was exposed to Christianity and Judaism, from respectively my dad and mom’s side. When I got married we did consult a church priest in regards to getting married in the church as this was (and I guess still is) common in addition to the official legal marriage. The church priest told us that if we would just do it to satisfy the family we should not do it. Not if we did not want it ourselves. We didn’t really see the need so we didn’t. It was a very personal thing and we wanted it to stay that way. It did not really impact on anyone other than our self.
In life (work) this should be very much the same. You believe what you want to believe, you live according to the way you believe you should and what works for you. But the big thing is that when it comes to work we generally work with other people. This requires that we trust and respect each other. In my small practice that is the same. We are like a family and within the team we have people with different cultural back grounds and religions. We respect and support each other. But what cannot be tolerated and accepted is if a culture and or religion takes over and starts to dictate what others can or cannot do. That is for each individual to decide. If you cannot accept your environment or respect its people than perhaps you are in a wrong environment. Tolerance is a big thing in this world and unfortunately we too often see a lack of it…
Light Watch 4-128: Lighting of religious places has something “holy”. Don’t we have an expression saying: “have you seen the light”?… 🙂
The LED challenge
Singapore 5th August 2013
Started the week with a little cold and sore throat, probably climate and time differences after my stay in Europe catching up. You get that once in a while. Don’t forget with my frequent travelling I am continuously exposed to whatever bug flies along in the plane, train or automobile…not to forget public places like airports, restaurants and other venues…can’t complain too much as I am rarely really sick (fingers crossed). 🙂
I headed my blog today with the title the LED challenge (as opposed to LED cowboys perhaps), as we as lighting designers and specifiers face a continuous challenge to find our way in this increasingly murky lighting market now so dominated by LED manufacturers on one hand and the continuous hammering from (new) suppliers knocking on your door. Today we had another one…we get a couple a week at least. Seeing the wood for the forest is a challenge that even for experienced designers like myself is a great challenge. On top of that today’s technology is already overtaken by tomorrow’s new upgrades, improvements or innovations. I am nearly reaching a state where I am thinking that I may revert fully to performance specifications without even mentioning a brand. I know what I want to achieve with the lighting but at times I am just challenged in finding the right fitting specifications. Maybe I should just leave it out there and just see what the wise men manufacturers and suppliers come up with to satisfy me. Many of the light fittings that I like or feel attracted to use somewhere have a component or performance that I don’t like or comes up short to my desired requirements. So maybe I should turn the process around.
There are a few problems with this approach. First is that performance influences the dimensions and quantities of light fittings, which in turn influences my lighting layouts and architectural integration; in short the visual impact of my lighting in space. I am talking specifically about the physical impact here. Then there is the uncertainty of the outcome; is there such fitting that I am after? And most of all how do I budget for something I don’t really know how it will turn out…quite some challenges to consider indeed!
Light Watch 4-127: Talking about seeing the trees from the forest; here are some recent concept images (day-night time) of a resort we are working on…integrating lighting with nature. I don’t really share too much of our designs for confidentiality but sometimes it’s nice to share a bit 🙂
Pro-active designing
Singapore 2nd August 2013
In my second day back in the Singapore office after the 3 day outing to Malaysia, much of my time was spent on design matters. It is amazing how relatively little time we actually spent designing and being creative as a lot of our time is being used up by administrative matters, coordination issues, communication (I spent a least one hour on skype calls today!), planning and so on, though you can argue that planning and administration matters also require quite some creative thinking at times! Anyhow today was much in the sign of actual designing and even more what I call pro-active designing. Several of our projects are on a fast track course and advanced planning and a pro-active attitude generally helps forward the project faster in my experience. This compared to waiting (and insisting) until you receive the completed information from the respective lead consultants, whether architect, interior designer or landscape specialist for instance.
I know that some practices don’t want to move unless the documents issued to them to start their work on are final and/ or approved, which is generally driven by financial motives so that they don’t end up doing abortive work and have grounds to claim variation fees if there are changes. All fair and well but it creates a very calculative and selfish mood which not necessarily promotes good spirit and smooth teamwork. I am more team oriented so today we moved on preliminary designs (even though we know that the lead consultant is still working on finalising them) so we can start the dialogue with the team and start sharing our design concepts and ideas, without having to wait for all final drawings to come in.
I have found over the years that such proactive approach and communication is much appreciated by team and client. Of course it needs to be something that make sense and of a consistency that warrants and allows for discussions and team feedback. In fact we find that this approach often reduces the chance of abortive work rather than increasing it. One of my key steps in any design process is too sit down with the key consultants in a one on one meeting and go through the design step by step. This has to be done with the creative lead designer and when it happens we generally manage to work out the main lighting concept as an integral part of the overall design concept with little abortive work in the future…
Light Watch 4-126: Some images for the weekend to tantalise the creative taste buds…
Taking responsibility
Kuala Lumpur- Singapore 1st August 2013
As a professional consultant we need to own up to our actions and recommendations. I have blogged about it before but really want to emphasize this again today. I had another round of project meetings today in regards to a project that has a very famous lead architect as its key consultant. But the interesting thing has been that several of the consultants have come and gone mostly because they were not able to establish their “personality” within the team due to the pressures of the lead design consultant. The point I am trying to make is that we are all professional consultants and our professional opinion and recommendations should be respected and trusted by the team. That is why we are appointed in the first place, right? Having a famous lead consultant does not mean that suddenly we need to let go of our design principles or “adjust” our recommendations just because big brother tells you so.
We have been on a collision course for quite a while now as we can honestly not reconcile the lead consultant’s design direction into a viable and responsible lighting design solution. It is not that we have disregarded their proposals, we have seriously put in the effort and done our due diligence to see if we could make it work, but in the end we found that our solution still is the best value for money with the best possible end result. However we find the lead consultant simply dismissing our recommendations and maintain their push for their perceived solution.
The question for us is whether we maintain our stand or simply bow to the lead consultants pressure. To me the answer is simple…we have to stay true to what we believe is right. If we follow the lead consultants advise and it turns out wrong, we can’t say that we did it because the lead consultant told us so, they in turn would say to us anyhow that we should have told them it would not work. If we follow our own and it goes wrong at least we can own up and take responsibility without having to resort to excuses…
Light Watch 4-125: Façade lighting design can be a tricky business, not only are we dealing with a multitude of “difficult” materials (glass, polished metals) sometimes there is not much architecture to light; using the interior lighting as an alternative to bring out the building at night can then be as effective, if not more!
Memory lane and the test of time
Kuala Lumpur 31st July 2013
After a day of meetings that ended a bit earlier than expected (yes some meetings can be conducted efficiently! 🙂 ), I decided to visit an old stomping ground, the KLCC Petronas Twin Towers, where I spent several years in the nineties working on the lighting design. Always interesting to see how your lighting design withstands the test of time. And when I say time I mean a design that was conceived 20 years ago. While we could not enter the office towers interiors and some lottery system applies for going up the link bridge, I did wander around in the KLCC Park which in its hey days was a horse racing course…so you can roughly imagine the size of the KLCC area with the buildings all build at the perimeter of the site. A now lush landscape provides a Hyde-Park-esque oasis in the bustling centre of KL.
I wandered around the main water pond with its multi-million dollar water fountain feature and looked at the light fittings, installed last century (yes really!) to get a feel how the design had stood the test of time. At the time the light fitting selection was considered modern and trendy, now nearly 20 years later some still look their part but most really look dated and most of all worn and battered! Some really battered and damaged from being exposed to public “contact” and years of maintenance, some with the original “guts” replaced rudely with ill-fitting LED substitutes. But most fixtures still run on their original lamp technology, such as CFL and Metal Halide, at least so I observed during the day. I have not been able to go back at night; I hope I can one night, as that will show me how well the lights hold up in terms of performance, lighting effects and durability. I suspect that some may be failing, some may have weathered down light outputs. I also observed that most in-ground tree up-lights had gone, probably because over time they had become a major maintenance headache, leaving trees with a desolate junction box lost in uselessness. But overall, after more than 15 years of being opened to an unforgiving public the lighting design still stands!
Light Watch 4-124: Here are some pictures that show you today’s state of the fittings. The pictures speak for themselves…
On site
Kuala Lumpur 30th July 2013
Not much time to rest! Already back on site in Kuala Lumpur to inspect a site mock after a long day of meetings…back in the groove! J After an early morning flight to KL we plunged straight into project meetings with presentations and discussions on design concepts, design directions, technology (read sophistication) and of course budgets. We presented landscape and interior lighting concepts. Tomorrow we continue with dedicated workshops…
We used the evening to drop in on another site we are working on to check out the results of value engineering applied to our design. While we had participated in the exercise and contributed with our recommendations, a visual mock-up was created on site to assess the viability of the value engineering. It was important for us to see in how far our recommendations were implemented (or not), hence the sire visit this evening was important to feedback our assessment to the client. On the way we got caught in a traffic jam caused by people rushing to break their fasting in this Ramandan month…
The area done up as a visual mock up was nothing glamorous, just a lift lobby, some corridors and toilets, part of what is later to become high end, high rise corporate office floors. My main bone of contention has been that the lighting systems which were carefully selected to achieved the desired results were brought back to (a) simple row(s) of down lights, thereby bringing the lighting ambience back to your average (cheap looking) office. The compromise being that these are not public areas, but private hence the savings would not be “seen” by the general public. Yet I feel like I am not honouring my design principles…should I or should I not stand my ground. My client has obvious budget limits and the client is King, isn’t it? Yet I need to advise my recommendations and findings and then let the client decide. If anywhere this would be the area where money could be saved…whether I like it or not!
Light Watch 4-123: Some images from tonight on site.
The long awaited book compilation of Martin's first year of blogging is available. Order now.
Feedspot Top 100 Lighting Blogs