PLDC 2017 Call for Papers
(France) – The sixth Professional Lighting Design Convention Call for Papers will be published on 1st September 2016.
The Call for Papers addresses both experienced practising professional lighting designers, as well as the new generation of lighting professionals, plus dedicated researchers and educators, industry representatives and professionals from related disciplines who work affects and involves professional lighting designers.
PLDC is an educational event, which encourages lighting professionals to share their insight and know-how. Previously published / presented papers will not be accepted and all papers are expected to be at a professional level, targeting a professional audience.
Submissions will be read and blind reviewed by three members of the Paper Reviewing Committee; all evaluated for the general quality and professionalism of the proposed paper, the suitability of the proposed paper’s content and the absolute importance the jury ascribes to the topic of the proposed paper. Based on the evaluation points awarded by the Paper Reviewing Committee, the Steering Committee of PLDC will select the final (approx) 70 papers for presentation.
For further information go to: www.pld-c.com
Pic: Michael Loos Photography
Megaman Filament Lamp Achieves a Which? Best Buy
(UK) - Megaman 5W Filament Classic LED lamp achieves Which? Best Buy status and can carry the coveted ‘Which? Best Buy’ logo.
Achieving a score of 81%, following assessment of the lamp’s light quality, efficiency, brightness, consistency across samples and power equivalence, the Megaman 5W Filament Classic LED lamp is an ideal choice for any decorative application.
Available in E27 or B22 formats, the lamp has an operating life of 15,000 hours (at L70), a warm colour temperature (2,700K), excellent colour rendering (80CRI) and delivers light output of 470lm.
Glen Krise at Megaman UK said: “We are proud to have been awarded a Which? Best Buy for our Filament Classic LED. It is a great lamp that delivers in terms of light quality and efficiency in decorative applications. It is proving very popular with end users and this independent acknowledgement from Which? emphasises the quality and consistency that is built into Megaman lamps.”
Trubridge destroys design copies
(Australia) - At a recent event in Sydney, David Trubridge destroys a pile of copies of his designs.
The aim was to alert Australians to the real cost of rip-off design products. On June 5th, at an event hosted by the Authentic Design Alliance (ADA) run by Anne-Maree Sargeant, David made his statement clear: “We will not put up with our designs being copied anywhere. It harms us, it harms the families my work feeds, it harms the entire Australian design industry and it harms the environment.”
International designer David Trubridge has been exhibiting his furniture and lighting in Australia since the early 2000’s. Many of his original designs hang within homes, offices and bars, but amongst them are pretenders: fakes made in China and imported into the Australian market, which has some of the weakest product design intellectual property laws in the world.
Citing Australia to be the "wild west of design copies" David, represented by Australian law firm K&L Gates, has won a significant battle against fake / unauthorised copies of his lighting designs.
David Trubridge’s team has fought for years to stop the fakes from being sold, some of which even find their way into leading big-box home chains. This recent landmark win has stopped multiple companies importing copies into Australia. One importer had a large number of lights removed from the market and destroyed as part of their settlement.
Last year David Trubridge Ltd (DTL) bought a fake from an online website in Australia and were surprised at the appalling quality of the copy, despite the store using images and text taken from the DTL website.
At the event, ADA director Anne-Maree Sargeant had a live conversation with David Trubridge discussing his recent landmark win. Following the talk David was joined by the audience in the destruction of a large number of fake Floral and Kina lights.
David said: “I don’t feel comfortable smashing these rip-offs as it goes against my ethos of care for this world, but the fake industry is harming much more than my own profits or sales so I must make this statement. When I was in Australia I heard many young designers had doubts about releasing their ideas there because they are immediately being copied and sold far cheaper and in bigger numbers than they can manage.
"Why would they stay and be ripped off when they can work in the UK where a design is fully covered for 70 years and copying is a criminal offence? 'Protection' is only 10 years in Australia, during which replicas are still allowed. I’ve seen my sales slip in Australia and there is a massive mindset problem there as people are fed the message that ‘replica’ design is somehow endorsed by the designer."
More information about Authentic Design Alliance can be found here: www.authenticdesignalliance.com.au
Luctra sponsors Light School's Light Talks
(UK) - Luctra confirms it will sponsor the Light Talks Theatre at Light School 2017.
Presented by Light Collective and hosted at the Surface Design Show, Light School takes place at the Business Design Centre in London from 7-9 February 2017 and provides architects and designers with education and knowledge about lighting design and products.
“Light School is a fantastic initiative and it is a privilege to be involved,” said Sean Starkey, Managing Director at Durable UK, manufacturer of LUCTRA. “Selecting the correct lighting is so important and there are many factors to consider; the design, how it interacts with its environment and perhaps most importantly, how it affects users. Light School will help its audience understand the advantages of good lighting and even highlight the impact it can have on individuals. We are really looking forward to being involved with the event in 2017.”
The aim of Light School is to ensure the audience leaves the show having learnt something that will change the way they see light. The Light Talks theatre hosts a programme of events providing architects and designers with access to many of the UK’s leading lighting designers. The lighting industry’s most illustrious companies are already signed up to speak at the event including BDP, Nulty+, GIA Equation, Electrolight, Firefly Lighting Design, Michael Grubb Studios, Light IQ and Light Bureau.
Below Stairs exhibition joins LDF
(UK) - As part of this year’s London Design Festival, Sir John Soane’s Museum will display four contemporary works by leading designers, created in response to the Museum’s restored Regency kitchens, which will open to the public for the first time.
The Museum, with guest curators Rachael Barraclough and Zoë Wilkinson, has invited four leading designers – Barber Osgerby, Jasper Morrison, Martino Gamper and Paul Cocksedge – to place new or recent work in the reinstated space.
The works will go on display as part of the exhibition Below Stairs which opens on 13 September 2016 and runs until 4 March 2017.
The display coincides with the completion of the Museum’s seven-year restoration project Opening Up the Soane, which has seen existing buildings developed and new spaces opened. The kitchens have been reinstated and can be seen by visitors for the first time in the Museum’s history.
In 1833, Sir John Soane negotiated an Act of Parliament to preserve his house and collection according to his wishes, in order to continue to inspire and educate future generations. It has enthralled countless people over the last 200 years and many designers cite the Soane Museum as one of their best loved and most inspirational places in London.
The exhibition’s title, Below Stairs, refers to the original use of these kitchens by Sir John Soane’s servants. Life for his servants was centred around the basement of the house; the front and back kitchens were the heart of domestic life and ensured the smooth running of the household. As the main hub for the servants’ activities, it was here where sumptuous meals were prepared, such as elaborate jellies and blancmanges, laundry washed, and provisions for the household ordered and part of the museum.
Xanthe Arvanitakis, Operations and Commercial Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, says: “It is an honour for us to partner with London Design Festival again, especially now in our fourth year running. It’s not only a wonderful community to be a part of, but allows the Museum to continue to share Sir John Soane’s passion for design with the public and design community.”
darc's ICFF Pick: Stickbulb Collection by RUX
(US) - The Stickbulb collection by RUX, is inspired by a desire to develop a truly sustainable lighting system.
A collection that caught our attention while walking the ICFF show floor - stopping us in our tracks in fact - sleek wooden beams come in one to six foot lengths and are designed to plug into and out of various steel hardware connectors without tools. The result is a light-up erector set of interchangeable components that allow for unlimited customisation and creativity.
As a starting point, the designers only considered designs that could be manufactured locally and affordably within a five mile radius of their New York City office. They chose to use reclaimed and sustainably sourced woods as a primary building material, and sourced energy efficient LED technologies and components. The collection is designed with the least number of parts possible and with connections that make the pieces easy to separate for maintenance, recycling, or reuse.
Santa & Cole revisits Vaghe Stelle for 30th anniversary
(US) - Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Santa & Cole reinvents its iconic Vaghe Stelle chandelier.
On show at ICFF in New York, the Vaghe Stelle was originally developed in 1982 by architect Antoni de Moragas y Spa for a converted textile warehouse in Barcelona that housed Brasserie FLO.
The stunning light is the most recent addition to Santa & Cole's Design Classics collection. With a polished brass finish, it has literary roots, taking its name from Giacomo Leopardi's poem Le Ricordanze, which refers to the Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa (the vague stars of the Big Dipper).
Launch Pad win for Jordan Tomnuk
(US) - Canadian lighting and furniture designer Jordan Tomnuk wins this year's Launch Pad at WantedDesign Manhattan.
Now in its third year, The Launch Pad is an international area dedicated to independent designers and small companies seeking for a manufacturer for their new products. Inspired by the worldwide famous Satellite at the Salone del Mobile, the Launch Pad aims for a set of successful launches, where products find their markets. The key words of this selection are inspiration, innovation and quality.
Voted for by the public online, during WantedDesign a jury of professionals reviewed the projects and awarded Tomnuk with the 'Launch Pad Best of 2016' award, receiving free booth space at WantedDesign 2017, a $2,500 cash prize and in person design meeting with DWR's Director of Merchandising.
designjunction + Dwell on Design NYC debut
(USA) - Keynote speaker Bob Gill to open designjunction + Dwell on Design.
designjunction + Dwell on Design opens tomorrow (May 13–15, 2016) with a display of cutting-edge design and captivating conversations. Taking place within the ArtBeam venue in New York’s Chelsea arts district, the event marks the first partnership for designjunction and Dwell on Design during NYCxDESIGN.
The exhibition space will feature more than 20 contemporary design brands including Buster + Punch, Muuto and Haberdashery to name but a few.
On Friday, May 13, renowned illustrator, graphic designer and author Bob Gill – who has influenced modern typography, design and graphics for more than 60 years – will headline the talks programme. Other key speakers include: Dorothy Cosonas, creative director of KnollTextiles, and Tim deFiebre, furniture designer and former assistant to Ward Bennett, who will discuss their experiences as stewards of modern design legacies.
On Saturday, May 14, architect Matthias Hollwich and Mikael Ydholm, head of research at IKEA, will discuss how architects and designers are using human-centered research to identify and address today's emerging problems. Rosanne Somerson, president of Rhode Island School of Design, will discuss the productive merits of boredom in an age of social media and how it affects our lives. Saturday will end with a talk on how architecture can engage with the public through design, where Oana Stanescu, cofounder of Family, will join Will Prince of PARC Office to introduce us to the new and imaginative ways in which architects and designers are creating works for the public user.
Sunday, May 15 will begin with a talk on the topic of online commerce with Bradford Shellhammer of eBay, Maria Molland Selby of Splacer, and Teddy Fong of Capsule discussing how digital platforms can engage with users and bridge the gap with a brick-and-mortar presence. Nina Stritzler-Levine, curator and director of the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, will discuss the work of Alvar Aalto's wife, Aino Marsio-Aalto, bringing it to the forefront of public attention. Sunday’s programme will finish with Caroline Baumann director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and landscape designer Margie Ruddick discussing landscape as an important discipline and aspect of design, as well as a national museum's civic responsibility to preserving green space.
As featured on issue 15 of arc magazine, exhibitor highlights will include lighting design specialists Haberdashery, who will be showing ‘Leaf’ in the US for the first time - a beautiful sculptural lighting product system made from delicate leaf-shaped bone china elements.
Other highlights will include London based design label Buster + Punch will exhibit its rock and roll inspired lighting collection, with influences taken from the London fashion, music and sub-culture scenes where the brand collaborates with street artists, bike builders, musicians and fashion designers to inject attitude into its crafted products.
British design brand Dyke & Dean, which fuses old school quality with a contemporary twist, will debut its new Slip Enamel range of enamelware at the show, whilst showcasing its new lighting ranges.
AARA, which designs and manufactures beautiful contemporary furniture and lighting, will show products from designers including Alexander Mueller, Catherine Aitken, Daniel Schofield, Ester Comunello and Suliman Innab.
London Design Fair launches
(UK) - New umbrella brand London Design Fair will include TENT London and Super Brands London, alongside growing host of international trade showcases.
Ten years in the making, TENT London has become adept at championing new designers, attracting global brands and showcasing countries, while connecting designers and brands with buyers, users, agents, media and specifiers. Continuing on this theme, London Design Fair will be a place where different countries will launch their designers and brands, introducing new products to the UK market.
Tent London Founder and Director, Jimmy MacDonald, explained: “The London Design Fair is an umbrella brand for Tent London and Super Brands London alongside the other shows we host, for example 100% Norway and the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland. With the addition of the third floor space at the Old Truman Brewery, we will be hosting further group shows, country showcases and themed exhibitions, affording these key facets even greater visibility. For our new name we decided on the London Design ‘Fair’, in part drawing inspiration from Europe, a region where we carry out a great deal of business and where ‘Fair’ is a familiar term.”
A partner of the 2016 London Design Festival, the London Design Fair will now include two days for trade visitors only, followed by two days for trade and the public.
Plans for the London Design Fair include:
- The launch of Trentino Collaborations. Initiated by the London Design Fair, four intrepid British designers are working directly with four Italian manufacturers, based in Trentino, to create a new capsule collection to be shown at the Fair.
- The continued development of the popular and prolific country pavilions. This year, the London Design Fair has invited India as the first ever guest country pavilion. Titled ‘This is India’, the pavilion will be co-curated by Spandana Gopal, Founder of London-based studio and accessories brand, Tiipoi. The exhibition will be designed by Kangan Arora, a London-based contemporary design studio.
- The launch of a new British Craft Pavilion, in partnership with the Crafts Council. Comprising 25 makers, an installation commissioned by the Crafts Council and a retail store, visitors can expect an inspiring British craft experience.
- A new third floor space.
More information can be found at: www.londondesignfair.co.uk
Panzeri hosts 'The Future of Decorative Lighting' round table
(Italy) - Ahead of Salone del Mobile in Milan, (held 12-17 April) Panzeri hosted ‘The Future of Decorative Lighting’ round table at Biassono headquarters.
Held on April 7, following this year’s Light+Building event in Frankfurt, the event aimed to address the direction decorative lighting, technology and materials are heading and was attended by designers and lighting designers.
Involved in this particular discussion sat the hosts Enzo Panzeri (Designer) and Norberto Panzeri (Partner and Head of Research & Development), architect Carmen Ferrara, architect and lighting designer Alexander Bellman (Studio C14), lighting designer Eugenia Marcolli (Studio Metis Lighting), and industrial designer Takahide Sano with his colleague of Studio Sano Francesca Preguerra.
The main topics discussed included the balance between design and mass production of lamps; how much new technologies are influencing forms and light management; the choices that Italy should make to continue to be competitive on the international market; and an overview of what is happening abroad from the point of view of product innovations.
“It was a new appointment in the panorama of Italian decorative lighting," commented Norberto Panzeri, "which once again demonstrates the dynamism of a company like Panzeri, open to new ideas and collaborations, events and useful initiatives. We have made available our office and opened the doors to our production, showing guests what we do and how we do it. This inclination to opening is for us a vocation, as demonstrated by the collaborations with universities and a communication highly oriented to digital and web channels. Just from the round table we received the confirmation this is the road to follow.”
Dame Zaha Hadid dies aged 65
(UK) - Iraqi-born architect, whose works include MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009) and London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games, passes after suffering sudden heart attack in Miami hospital.
It is with great sadness that Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE died suddenly in Miami in the early hours of this morning. She had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital.
Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today. Born in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before starting her architectural journey in 1972 at the Architectural Association in London.
By 1979 she had established her own practice in London – Zaha Hadid Architects – garnering a reputation across the world for her ground-breaking theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, her interest was in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of innovative technologies often resulting in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.
Zaha Hadid’s first major built commission, one that affirmed her international recognition, was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects including the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009), the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010) have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with visionary spatial concepts defined by advanced design, material and construction processes.
In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She twice won the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI Museum in Rome, a building for the staging of 21st century art, the distillation of years of experimentation, a mature piece of architecture conveying a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation; and the Evelyn Grace Academy, a unique design, expertly inserted into an extremely tight site, that shows the students, staff and local residents they are valued and celebrates the school’s specialism throughout its fabric, with views of student participation at every turn.
Zaha Hadid’s other awards included the Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and in 2012, Zaha Hadid was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture.
She held various academic roles including the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. Hadid also taught studios at Columbia University, Yale University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Zaha Hadid was recently awarded the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honour in her own right. Sir Peter Cook wrote the following citation:
"In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture…. for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable ‘eye’: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere ‘fashion’.
And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, ‘spiky’ period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her admired Russian Suprematists and Constructivists – attempting with them to capture that elusive dynamic of movement at the end of the machine age.
Necessarily having to disperse effort through a studio production, rather than being a lone artist, she cottoned–on to the potential of the computer to turn space upon itself. Indeed there is an Urban Myth that suggests that the very early Apple Mac ‘boxes’ were still crude enough to plot the mathematically unlikely – and so Zaha with her mathematics background seized upon this and made those flying machine projections of the Hong Kong Peak project and the like. Meanwhile, with paintings and special small drawings Zaha continued to lead from the front. She has also been smart enough to pull in some formidable computational talent without being phased by its ways.
Thus the evolution of the ‘flowing’ rather than spikey architecture crept up upon us in stages, as did the scale of her commissions, but in most cases, they remained clear in identity and control. When you entered the Fire Station at Vitra, you were conscious of being inside one of those early drawings and yes, it could be done. Yet at perhaps its highest, those of us lucky enough to see the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku in the flesh, can surely never have been in such a dream-like space, with its totality, its enormous internal ramp and dart-like lights seeming to have come from a vocabulary that lies so far beyond the normal architecture that we assess or rationalize.
So we are presenting her with this Medal as a British Institution: and as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire: thus she might seem to be a member of our British Establishment. Yet in reality, many of our chattering classes and not a few fellow architects have treated her with characteristic faint praise, and when she heroically won the Cardiff Opera House competition, blocking the scheme. Or when we awarded her the RIBA Stirling Prize for the school in South London – her second win in a row - we, the jury, were loudly derided by a number of distinguished architects. Of course, in our culture of circumspection and modesty her work is certainly not modest, and she herself is the opposite of modest. Indeed her vociferous criticism of poor work or stupidity recalls the line-side comments of the tennis player John McEnroe. Yet this is surely characteristic of the seriousness with which she takes the whole business: sloppiness and waywardness pain her and she cannot play the comfy British game of platitudinous waffle that is the preferred cushion adopted by many people of achievement or power. Her methods and perhaps much of her psychology remain Mesopotamian and not a little scary: but certainly clear.
As a result, it is perhaps a little lonely there up at the top, surrounded now by some very considerable talent in the office, but feared somewhat and distanced from the young. Yet in private Zaha is gossipy and amusing, genuinely interested in the work of talented colleagues who do very different architecture such as Steven Holl, and she was the first to bring to London talent such as Lebbeus Woods or Stanley Saiotowitz. She is exceptionally loyal to her old friends: many of whom came from the Alvin Boyarsky period of the Architectural Association: which seems to remain as her comfort zone and golden period of friendship. Encouraged and promoted at an early age by Boyarsky, she has rewarded the AA with an unremitting loyalty and fondness for it.
The history of the Gold Medal must surely include many major figures who commanded a big ship and one ponders upon the operation involved that gets such strong concepts as the MAXXI in Rome – in which the power of organization is so clear - or the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck where dynamic is at last captured – or the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics where the lines diving boards were as fluid as the motion of the divers - made into reality. And she has done it time and time again in Vienna, Marseilles, Beijing and Guangzhou. Never has she been so prolific, so consistent. We realize that Kenzo Tange and Frank Lloyd Wright could not have drawn every line or checked every joint, yet Zaha shares with them the precious role of towering, distinctive and relentless influence upon all around her that sets the results apart from the norm. Such self-confidence is easily accepted in film-makers and football managers, but causes some architects to feel uncomfortable, maybe they’re secretly jealous of her unquestionable talent. Let’s face it, we might have awarded the medal to a worthy, comfortable character. We didn’t, we awarded it to Zaha: larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case.
Our Heroine.
How lucky we are to have her in London."
Details of Zaha Hadid’s memorial service will be announced shortly.
Messages of condolences can be sent to: pa@zaha-hadid.com
