Four case studies from Light Bureau

By Paul Traynor and Arve Olsen

Paul Traynor is head of Light Bureau. Key projects include the NATO Headquarters in Brussels and the Royal Academy in London. Paul was President of the Professional Lighting Designer’s Association and is visiting lecturer at Wismar University of Applied Sciences and KTH in Stockholm. He also teaches at the University of Greenwich.

Arve Olsen is Design Director at Light Bureau. His experience includes lighting design for the Royal Academy in London and developing a lighting masterplan for Longyearbyen – the northernmost town in the world. Arve is a guest lecturer in lighting design, mentors industrial design students at the School of Architecture in Oslo, and is past president of the Norwegian Lighting Designers Association.

Projects in Denmark, Norway and the UK illustrate both urban and rural approaches to designing with light.

Musicon

Copenhagen, Denmark

About 30km from Copenhagen is the city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand. In 2003, the municipality bought the former concrete factory and gravel pit, and since then it has developed into a dynamic urban development. Because of its industrial heritage, there was a legacy of old factory buildings, and these attracted curious and creative people to the district. Temporary events and spaces helped to activate Musicon, and early settlers included skaters, artists and a dance theatre. Alongside the re-purposed industrial sites, new buildings are being erected – the most recognisable arguably is the Ragnarock Museum, designed and built for young people, with a huge, cantilevered overhang to give shelter for concerts and events outdoors. There are already skate parks, and as an initiative to encourage cycling and walking between Musicon and the train station, the municipality conceived a permanent intervention – one that would really come into its own after dark. The Musicon path, better known as the Pump Track, is a piece of urban landscape with a difference.

The lighting consists of two layers; the architectural layer in the front (white) and the behavioural layer that emerges behind the cyclist as they ride the track (blue)

© Tomasz Majewski / Light Bureau

Central themes in its development were play and learning. The track is undulating, and the lighting concept was based on the flow of water. As water can exist in many different states – calm, agitated, flowing – the Pump Track was designed to react to the user. Based on how fast the rider navigates the track, sensors in the lighting columns pick up the speed and create a coloured light trail; the faster the rider can go, the longer the trail becomes, so encouraging competition between riders and keeping the track interesting. When the track is ‘resting’, the light projection reverts to white light, so after about 10 seconds, the track is again ready for the next attempt.

Safety obviously cannot be ignored at the expense of creativity in a public project, so the concept was supported by 2 principles – or 2 layers. The first is architectural: ensuring that there is sufficient amenity and visibility. The second layer is the behavioural layer: the flowing wave, which is responsible for the playful interaction between user and track.

Light Bureau’s Copenhagen office was responsible for the project, working with public artist Simon Panduro. There are 23 projector heads mounted on 7 posts. The heads are finished red and fitted with honeycomb louvres to avoid glare for the users. The sensors are LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) – compact, fast and reliable laser devices – technology that is being used in autonomous vehicles. Different scenarios are programmed, so for special events like the music festival, the lighting can be turned a different colour, controlled via SMS.

Vandalism is unfortunately a fact of life,and Musicon has its own share of such problems. But the Pump Track has given local people a preventative diversion in their neighbourhood, and it’s a great example of a city being well connected to its inhabitants.

The 90 metre long pump track is a fun ride for all ages

© Tomasz Majewski / Light Bureau

Cycle Super Highway

Gladsaxe, Denmark

When entering the tunnel the interactive light wheels starts spinning

© Christian Ankerstjerne / Light Bureau

Cycling is a really popular form of transport in Denmark – 36% of all Danish adults commute by bicycle to work daily or at least once a week, and 45% of Danish children cycle to school. Providing good lighting to support these journeys is at least as crucial as lighting roadways. The Cycle Super Highway project is a 21km route connecting urban centres in the Gladsaxe Municipality. Known as the Farum route, there are 12 tunnels to be navigated by cyclists, and at the time this project commenced, they were doing little to promote a feeling of safety or accessibility. The project also wished to address how to create a recognisable visual identity through means of light that would encourage more people to cycle.

The wheels have a solid design that protects them from vandalism

© Christian Ankerstjerne / Light Bureau

Light Bureau’s Copenhagen office co-created the project of Tunnel 11 by collaborating with an urban planner and lighting design students from Aalborg University in Copenhagen. The students carried out user surveys as part of their semester project for one selected tunnel. Users reported that they found the tunnel to be unsafe and that the transition between the outside in daylight and inside the tunnel was hard to adjust to.

Three core values were identified: identity, flow and presence. Identity is achieved through the form of the bicycle wheel and the orange colour as determined through collaboration with the urban planner. The second – flow – is the dynamic effect of the concealed light which rotates in the same direction as the cyclist’s wheel. And presence, where the rotation effect decelerates gradually, leaving a sense of activity for the next cyclist who enters the tunnel.

There are 2 forms of lighting in the tunnel – the dynamic wheel and soffit mounted downlights. The latter are needed particularly during the daytime to balance the light levels on the inside with the outside, overcoming the transition issue. The fixtures selected give off warm white light, creating quite strong circular pools of light centrally, and reinforcing the wheel motif. Also, because they are directional, they reduce the spill light to the tunnel sides, so that the wheels’ impact is not diluted.

Control is automatic: a daylight sensor at the tunnel mouth adjusts the dimming of the amenity lighting, and motion sensors detect the approach of cyclists and trigger the wheel’s light rotation. Different effects can be accessed through the control system by SMS.

Resilience is needed in outdoor locations, and that quality was demonstrated by the designers hitting the wheels and hanging off them physically.

The orange colour refers to the logo of the cycle super highway secretariat (SCS).

© Christian Ankerstjerne / Light Bureau

At night the light dims to minimize the need for dark light adaption when leaving the tunnel

© Christian Ankerstjerne / Light Bureau

The spinning light wheels also have a safety function, as they indicate whether you can expect any traffic in the tunnel

© SCS

Fordham Park

UK

Fordham Park is a communal space located between New Cross and New Cross Gate stations in South London. It is a key green space, and provides an intersection between transport hubs, shops and houses. There are two schools at the park boundary.

Good lighting for amenity and face recognition was a necessity for this play park

© Paul Traynor

The Landscape Partnership, with whom we worked, were keen to introduce play as a major theme. When we studied the existing park, we noticed that at several locations at the park perimeter there were ventilation pipes coming out of the ground. We used this motif as a basis of the lighting equipment for our design.

The Landscape Partnership worked out a scheme with nodes at three key access points to the park and then linked them by desire lines. There were many mature trees through the park, and we were keen to include them to give context and interest to night-time pedestrian journeys. To help distinguish these three arteries through the park, we decided to include colour in our concept.

We are now all used to LED light sources, but in 2009, when this project was designed, they were still very new. This specification was not innovation for the sake of it; with conventional light sources we could not achieve the optical quality we sought – narrow distribution in terms of path width, but wide spread along pathway lengths to avoid light spill to the grassed areas. We also wanted to achieve a high quality warm white light.

The playful pipe theme extends to the New Cross railway underpass

© Paul Traynor

Our column height was 4 metres; at a human scale and high enough for good light distribution and economical spacing. We designed the pathway columns to include small, directional coloured LED feature lights at 2.4m to light trees alongside the pathways.

The column design followed the pipe theme. The columns were bespoke; fabricated from cylindrical galvanised steel. At the post-ends, we introduced the single colour LED to denote which path the pedestrian is using. At nodes, we used narrow beam sources to punch light on to the ground, giving some drama and announcing changes in direction.

Height and drama emphasise the nodes, making navigation more legible

© Paul Traynor

The principle for play spaces was to ensure great, vertical light so that children could navigate safely, and carers and parents could keep an eye on them.

The final element was the underpass between Pagnell Street and New Cross Station. We continued the play theme into the tunnel. Both sides of the tunnel are decorated with networks of pipework including (again, standard) linear opal diffuse fittings to give good amenity and safety, and to thematically connect with Fordham Park.

Jørpelandsholmen Nature Walk

Strand Municipality, Norway

Bespoke bollard luminaires lead the way along the path like torches. Lighting the cliff faces make the surroundings legible

© Fovea.Studio

The island of Jørpelandsholmen, situated just outside of Jørpeland in Strand Municipality, Norway, had prior to 2017 only been accessible by boat from the mainland. Historically used as farmland, but now disused, the municipality saw untapped potential in the island as a recreational area for the residents of Jørpeland, and as a destination for the 200,000+ tourists visiting the nearby Pulpit Rock every year. A pedestrian bridge connecting the island to the mainland was established, and landscape architect Anita Ellefsen Hus masterminded the new 2.1km nature walk around the island that included a number of key destinations along the route. She also subtly adjusted the landscape to enhance views out from the island, as well as making the path accessible to all.

A year after the nature walk opened, Light Bureau was approached to design a lighting scheme for the path. Being the first to introduce electric lighting to a previously unlit island was a rare opportunity to explore just how little light is needed for people to see, and for us to make their experience truly magical after dark. Light Bureau approached the project with a strategy of balancing the artificial light against the night sky and avoiding any glare, so that the nocturnal vision of walkers was maintained and views out across the fjord preserved.

Working at this threshold of ‘just enough light’ is a challenge, since most standard luminaires are designed for high brightness urban environments. Through onsite light tests and discussions with the landscape architect and client, it was clear that a bespoke range of luminaires was required. The products were designed by Light Bureau and manufactured by expert local metal workshops that normally build for the oil industry. The luminaires had to withstand the harsh salt water environment of the island, frequent rainfall, the grazing sheep maintaining the landscape and children playing on the island. Corten steel was the material of choice, due to its robust qualities and natural patina that would blend in and complement the natural environment both during day and night time.

One of our main takeaways from the project is the importance of involving local craftsmen. It evokes a strong sense of ownership within the community when they know the people that built it. For the municipality, it is a no brainer as most of the money spent on the project was invested right back into local businesses. Nobody loses, everyone wins.

The restrained use of light resulted in a scheme that respected the nocturnal environment of the island, and that added a very low carbon footprint by use of locally manufactured products with minimal power consumption. It is estimated that the lighting for the 2.1km path used 575W in its dimmed state, less than 0.3W per metre.

Bespoke bollards with adjustable mini spotlights illuminate feature landscape elements

© Fovea.Studio

After crossing the 150m long bridge to the island, you arrive at the first destination where light levels are balanced against the moonlight

© Kristofer Ryde