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Light Design
KLAUS-PETER SIEMSSEN
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KLAUS-PETER SIEMSSEN
Cover Exhibition Centre London Photo: Mark Humphries Photography
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Puma Headquarter Herzogenaurach Photo: Markus Bollen
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Mercedes Benz Museum Stuttgart Photo: Ramon Prat
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YOU NEVER SEE LIGHT ITSELF, YOU ONLY SEE THE REFLECTION. THE AIR IS FULL OF SUNLIGHT BUT YOU DON’T SEE IT TILL IT HITS SOMETHING.
PAINTING WITH LIGHT
KLAUS-PETER SIEMSSEN
Klaus-Peter, the title of your talk is intriguing, do you paint with light yourself?
Light is more than just sales figures to you then?
I am the CEO of a lighting company and would not call myself a professional lighting designer. We create lighting tools, so I come out of the lighting design philosophy but I have the perspective of someone who produces the paint and the brushes. And when you speak to the producer of paint he may have a different point of view to the painter. How did your interest in lighting begin? Oh, this started like most passions in life – with a coincidence. Within a Siemens Trainee Program I got a sales responsibility for one year at a lighting company in Slovenia. That was the moment I started to look at every ceiling immediately upon entering a room – and this has not changed since then. To paint our surroundings with light is a very inspiring profession.
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Light enables one of our senses and allows us to see. Selux first loves light and then is a profit & loss organisation. Enabling or supporting the most creative experts, building their dreams is something you have to fall in love with. Light and music are enormous stimulators for our emotions. The Eiffel tower at night, the sun-set or a candle-lit dinner with the person of your choice: Light allows us to see things a little bit differently. So, there’s always a context, for lighting? You never see light itself, you only see the reflection. The air is full of sunlight but you don’t see it till it hits something. Good lighting solutions are often individual solutions. On the other hand customers expect the practical benefits of a well-considered product range. Our focus is to develop modular lighting systems which answer both demands.
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Sounds difficult... I wouldn’t say difficult or easy. It’s a process of being careful and listening. Translating what is desired into technology. This understanding is crucial for us. I think all professionals have this driver to improve, make things better, combine ideas, generate evolutions. Since human beings learned to use tools we have been fascinated by this opportunity to improve life by improving tools.
the story book of the urban space. It’s like a film. And in this film, illumination plays a crucial role. Outdoor illumination plays two rolls, the illumination, but also a piece of architecture. In the end though, human beings just love to have a story. And what kind of story did they want for the Old Port?
Any other complicating factors we should be aware of?
In Marseille, they wanted as few lighting columns as possible. And they wanted to show the area had strength, size, and mass.
You have to consider local differences. For example, take the skyline in Shanghai – a European might say it is too bright. Light is an emotional issue which is driven by culture and taste and history.
If you look at the images you can see that the masts were twenty three meters high. They’re so big you don’t see them at first, you can’t tell where the light is coming from. It’s a very powerful sign.
Also, you have to remember that illumination is relative to its surrounding. A gas station in the countryside is like an illuminated island in the dark. The same gas station in the middle of a city can give us a feeling of a “dark spot”.
It looks like a set, just waiting for someone to call ‘Action!’
So how do you go about designing a lighting system that ‘works’. For example, your Old Port project in Marseille? Lighting designers and architects, they have a story for the area. Often this comes from a historical and future oriented approach. ‘Where have we come from and what do we want to achieve?’ Out of that they write a story book. Some people say, the lighting concept is a logical consequence out of
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Ordrupgaard Museum Photo: Roland Halbe
If you ask a person on the street in Marseille, ‘what’s the story with this lighting?’ they could just say ‘because it’s nice’. Or they could say, “Well, we used to have a lot of sailing ships here with huge masts, and today these lighting columns symbolise those ship’s mast.” To be fair I’m not sure if that was the story, but you get the idea. What is the relationship between Selux and the people who imagine those stories, the lighting designers? It’s a symbiotic relationship. His purpose is to come up with smart, better, innovative solutions to illuminate buildings.
AN EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD PROJECT IS SIMPLE IN ITS RESULT BUT DEMANDS ALL WE CAN GIVE TO ACHIEVE IT. 27.11.2014 10:53
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And for that he needs tools, weapons! Like a cook, he needs new ingredients. Only with innovation will he gain the respect of the owner and architect. And we need lighting consultants, they are the artists who use our weapons and tools. If I put a lot of time into developing fancy new tools I need an artist who can understand how to use them. To honour the detail. If we have a perfect cut-off or a better lumen output, or if we can shift the colour temperature of the product more accurately than ever, someone has to be able to use and explain this to his client. A lighting designer is the artist for me, he brings our tools to life. Our heroes and our strongest judge.
GOOD ARCHITECTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN STRONGLY DRIVEN BY LIGHT DESIGN.
Lighting design sounds like it’s just a little bit more challenging than rocket science! Well, the world is more sophisticated today and at the same time new technologies and tools allow us to work differently than we used to do. But, good architecture has always been strongly driven by light design. Light has always been used as a powerful tool to influence emotions. Without artificial light your life would experience some changes. So does the impetus for a new light usually come from necessity?
Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg Photo: Lukas Roth Previous page Hochwasserpumpwerk KĂśln Photo: Markus Bollen
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It comes from somewhere else most often. In the end what we do, our function is to bring innovation, today is strongly technology driven.
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When you look at the iPhone. The possibility came of out miniaturisation and the availability of a good touch terminal. Those are the core. First you had to have a good touch panel, then you could get rid of keyboards on phones and your phone today is a TV, camera, notebook... Okay, so technological innovation is crucial. Where does the LED fit into all this? The LED has caused the amount of opportunities to explode! The rules of the game are changing. The lighting industry is going through a tremendous change. The LED as a light source has an effect on product concepts, product design but also on lighting design. Great! What exactly is an LED? The LED is a semi-conductor. How is that different to a regular light bulb? Historically a lamp has a glass bulb with a fixture. You had a number of lamps of a certain size with reflectors around them. That was the name of the game. Today you have the LED, which is a small dot. And you can arrange these dots in all sorts of forms and layers. The optical potential is massive. It’s like Lego. It allows a complete new form of flexibility.
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This is painting with light?
Could you give an example?
That’s right. LED luminaires can be controlled with software, like any Semi-Conductor. You can put red, green, yellow LEDs on a PCB, put an optic above that. Add a controller and software and you can go through colours and temperatures as much as you want. Flexibility has exploded. But like always: More power results in more responsibility.
Often a core competence for us is to direct light. To that end, one of the new technologies we’ve been working with is extrusions. So now, you can extrude lighting curves into a fixed material. We’ve named this extraordinary technology Light Modulation Optics.
How do you even know where to start?
Museum Gunzenhauser Chemnitz Photo: Werner Hutmacher
You need to have experts. Only lighting designers, architects and interior designers as a team can solve these problems. And it takes a long time to build up the necessary experience. I’ve been at it for twenty years and I think in ten years I’ll be up to the job! So your job is seeing possibilities in the technology? Being close to the most innovative specifiers, our role as manufacturer, is to see what kind of technology and academic research is available that could contribute something to a great lighting concept. We have to drive this innovation process and develop new technologies.
Umicore Antwerpen Selux Benelux Photo: Zoooom.be
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My job – the job here – is to think out of the box and say ‘That is something that could give a lighting designer more options to improve the light culture, the energy efficiency, the design of urban space.’
Then we have software. We know there’s an intelligent way to understand the lighting output of an LED so we’ve developed software which takes that into consideration and ensures the lumen per watt remains stable over the lifetime of the product. Why do that? So that when you go into a museum you won’t have any negative effects when you look at a picture over a period of time. If the lumen goes down, the light level goes down. It’s a technical mine-field! Light is a medium which we usually do not notice unless it goes wrong. An extraordinarily good project is simple in its result but demands all we can give to achieve it. Like the World Trade Centre Memorial in New York? Indeed. The most dramatic moment America has had in the last 100 years, perhaps. And when someone wanted to send a message, they sent it with light. This is painting with light.
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That looks like it took some doing...?
So how can you judge a ‘good’ lighting solution?
They wanted people to be impressed by the size but also the silence. So people can sit and think. Light is a strong tool to direct people. To lead them and give them a particular sensation or feeling.
What is good light? What is cheap light? It’s like cooking, sometimes fish and chips is great food. Other times you want something fancy. It depends on the moment. Illuminating ‘Ground Zero’ is different to Times Square. Good light reflects the DNA of the place and the emotions of the visitor.
It’s like fire at night time. Human beings are programmed to respond to it. The mixture of water, scale and light is very emotional. Which part came from Selux?
The mental pictures everyone has of these monumental sites is usually a night-time shot: Light is the black tie of a building.
Can you see little columns of light above the golden river?
Surely science has something to say about people and light?
Why is lighting so frequently under-used?
There’s a lot of science and marketing behind all of this. For example, we are told that a certain bluish light has the effect of making people more awake and attentive. But the story is not so straightforward – we have learned that the response is not universal.
Very often lighting is seen in the same way as heating or cooling. Which means efficiency and price per sq m. But in the end, when you ask ’Is it good or bad?’ it’s assessed more like food or wine. If you take a Chinese person, a Swede and an Englishman, along with an old and a young person and put them in the same office, then ask them “Is this good light?” you’ll get five answers! The Scandinavian will say this is a bit of a cold colour temperature. The Chinese will say it’s too warm, the old person will say it’s too dark, the young one too light. And we haven’t mentioned colour yet...
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Recently they started to do tests in schools where they used the bluish part of the light at certain times of day – they hoped this would have positive effects on pupils. The detail of this study showed that you have people who are early birds, they have their best time in the morning. Then others who are better in the evening. And for the evening people the blue light isn’t going to make a difference. They aren’t going to become early birds...
GOOD LIGHT REFLECTS THE DNA OF THE PLACE AND THE EMOTIONS OF THE VISITOR. 27.11.2014 10:53
Porsche Museum Zuffenhausen Photo: Brigida Gonzales
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Are there fashions in lighting? It’s a bit circular but in the end fashion comes from opportunity and the LED allows colours. For a while it was fancy to illuminate buildings with blue or red or yellow. Christmas illuminations, for a while you used to see a lot of blue lights? The reason for that is simple: A basic LED, when it makes light, is blue. Only by putting phosphor on top of it do we bring the light from blue into white. But the cheapest version is blue, so companies made lots of blue Christmas lights early on. And people thought, oh, that’s cool! Trends form technology, again.
Top left Marktplatz Neubrandenburg Photo: Bernd Lasdin Top right Cours Victor Hugo, Bordeaux Selux Frankreich
Busbahnhof Hennef Photo: Markus Bollen
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Trends can be dangerous can’t they? People are terribly fickle. Human beings love fashion and consistency. At Selux, we think in 20-30 year cycles. We know our customers are stylish but they are also timeless. That’s the DNA of our company. We don’t want to be fashion orientated. However, there are always fashions, there are good and bad trends. But the lifecycle for fashion in architecture, it’s maybe 30 years. Look at the period of promoterism in nineteenth century Germany – “Gründerzeit”. Back then humans were willing to spend a lot of money on the beauty of architecture. For details. Today we have a trend of very functional thinking. Cars, buildings. Fashion, it’s all very functional. Products have to show their material. Their love of detail.
Things need to feel like they have purpose? When you think about things like iPads, things we love today. They’re a great mixture between art and functionality. Porsche, BMW, they are art. They show the competence of human beings to create. But they also have to fulfil very standard demands: Bringing you safely from one place to another. You work with Porsche quite often, don’t you? Not exclusively but yes, our latest job was for Porsche’s R&D headquarters in Leipzig. What exactly did Porsche need? Visitors go there to experience high quality design and that’s what they want to see in the lighting and architecture they pick. More painting with light? Yes. And what we see more and more is that we paint with white light. We simply use the colour temperature to allow different colours of white. Sounds wonderful! MyWhite, we call it. This allows you to make your own personal white. However you feel comfortable. You can control colour temperature from 2800 up to 7000 kelvin. We can give a space different clothing to suit whatever is being done there.
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Klaus-Peter Siemssen 26 November 2014, 6.30 pm / Mudam Luxembourg
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