Cover 1_rto4 - Illuminating Engineering Society

LIGHTFAIR INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR PREVIEW
PHOTO: VESA HONKONEN
is scary and threatening. For me, it means peace and rest. Light
is the outburst of energy, life. It is always produced somehow.
It will last as long as the reaction causing it is alive. Light has
the concept of time built in it.Two separate lights can give a
meaning or dimension. Time to darkness can be measured by
marking the boundaries for the indefinable darkness, including
an end and a starting point.
This approach is easy to repeat with sound and silence. Total
silence has no dimensions for our senses. Sound is an outburst,
created with energy. Sound itself has a length, which can be
measured both by time and quantity. Music contains many
extremely powerful examples of the power of silence. Two
notes, which mark the beginning and the end of a silence, are
usually the most powerful moments of many symphonies. But,
there are also quiet moments between two notes. During the
wait for the next sound, you can almost feel the time and anticipation.
Silence gets a meaning and a length.
In order to see light, study darkness; in order to hear sound,
study silence. This indicates the poetry in lighting design
Poems in figures and calculations
The history of electrical lighting is short, only some 100
years. As always in culture, various factors direct the progress.
We seldom realize that one of the biggest factors to our exterior
lighting quality is the energy crisis in the 1970s.
In order to achieve efficient lighting, lamp manufacturers
started to concentrate on high pressure and low pressure sodium
lamps. Sales were great but the quality was in question. As
always, using those lamps was almost like a fashion. Yellow fog
covered the quality aspects.
Similar things have happened in many other fields also. The
progress has been directed by technically orientated people,
and it takes a while before design and visually orientated professionals
get involved. Now it seems the time is right for high
quality lighting. The lamp manufacturers have also noticed this
progress. Light sources have become smaller, with greater
www.iesna.org
The Railway Station Plaza fixture in front of architect
Eliel Saarinen’s station building.
lm/W values, longer lifetime and excellent color properties.
This has given new possibilities, as well as new challenges to
lighting fixture design. The world is open for good design combined
with high quality techniques.
Let’s take a look at two examples, the Railway Station Plaza
in Helsinki with Eliel Saarinen’s architecture and the Aura River
in Turku, which is the oldest city of Finland. In both cases, the
goal has been to combine design and high quality techniques
in harmony. As always, when facing something new, people
reject. We also met a reasonable amount of resistance and critics
based on other arguments like; “we have never done it this
way.” But in the end, the result speaks for it self.
The Railway Station Plaza project was the result of a winning
design competition entry, done in co-operation with
Philip Gabriel. The place is culturally and architecturally
important. After a long path of various design phases we
came to the solution to light the plaza with just one type of
luminaire, a 4.5 m tall indirect fixture. We used 150 W
ceramic metal halide lamps. The pole was 140 mm thick. One
lamp was located on the top part of the pole to take care of
the indirect light and the other was inserted to height of 2.2
m to create direct facade lighting.
The battle for the right light distribution, lamp chamber