Architectural Record 2015-04

22
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD APRIL 2015
perspectivenews
The Aura of Light
BY ZACHARY EDELSON
the sense of daylight and shadow was so
pervasive at the Milan-based firm Argot ou La
Maison Mobile’s exhibition at the 2014 Venice
Architecture Biennale, visitors thought that
the architects punched skylights through the
Arsenale’s historic ceiling. But what appeared
to be a brilliantly daylit room was actually
an illusion created by a new lighting system
that simulates natural sunlight with unprecedented
levels of fidelity.
The technology—developed over the last 10
years by Paolo Di Trapani, a physicist at the
University of Insubria and founder of the
Como, Italy–based CoeLux—comprises skylightand
windowlike constructions made up of
polymer sheets imbued with LEDs and a thin
layer of transparent nanoparticles that simulate
the effect of the earth’s atmosphere on
sunlight. The resulting CoeLux panels seem to
picture a bright solar disk amid blue sky. This
faux sun appears fixed in the sky, as the real
sun would, so that one’s movement in a room
doesn’t cause it to visibly shift its position.
Di Trapani is quick to note that, unlike similar
lighting products,
this requires the
careful detailing an
actual skylight would
to be like “a window,
a real opening.”
The manufacturer
recently completed a
trial installation in
the radiosurgery room
at a hospital in Milan.
Hospitals, where
patients can be confined
in windowless
rooms for extended
periods, are eager to explore the product’s
health benefits. Beyond medical applications,
Di Trapani says potential applications range
from the revitalization of underground spaces
to office towers with large floorplates.
Currently, CoeLux is available in three
versions, each with a particular light quality
CoeLux units were installed in a hospital in Milan.
and shadow angle: CoeLux 60 reproduces a
bright, vertical tropical angle of light with a
60-degree beam; CoeLux 45 mimics a
Mediterranean sky
with a 45-degree ceiling
beam; and the
wall-mounted CoeLux
30 simulates a warm
Nordic sun with a
30-degree-angle beam
relative to the horizon.
CoeLux plans U.S.
distribution shortly.
There is one caveat:
the units need to be
deeply recessed to
provide the desired
illusion. A panel of
20 square feet requires a 3-foot ceiling depth.
While Di Trapani acknowledges that this is
a challenge, he feels the rewards are worth it.
According to him, CoeLux allows architects
to “put nature onstage, to play with the sun,
the sunbeams, the rays, the shadows, and all
color.” ■
New Auction House
by Ole Scheeren
Rises in Beijing
BY FRED A. BERNSTEIN
ole scheeren helped create perhaps the most
aggressive building on the Beijing skyline—
the CCTV tower, which he designed with Rem
Koolhaas before opening his own firm, Buro
Ole Scheeren, in 2010. Now Scheeren hopes to
become known for a less divisive contribution
to the Beijing scene—an auction house headquarters
that, despite its 600,000 square feet,
treads lightly on its site, and which may represent
a way forward for foreign architects in
China under a culturally conservative regime.
Scheeren’s client is the Chinese-owned
auction house China Guardian, which wanted
more than the requisite galleries and sales
rooms. Indeed, its so-called Guardian Art
Center, scheduled to open in 2016, will include
a 120-room hotel—and a library, bookshop,
lecture hall, and restaurants.
The building is rising on one of Beijing’s
most famous commercial streets, Wangfujing,
near the National Art Museum of China and a
few blocks from the Forbidden City. Devel opers
had been trying for 18 years to win approval
to build on the site. Scheeren says, “We had to
demonstrate how we had carefully embedded
the project in this very historic and sensitive
The Guardian Art Center, in addition to serving as an
auction house, will include shops and a 120-room hotel.
context.” His partner on the project is the
Chinese-government-owned Beijing Institute
of Architectural Design (BIAD).
Zhang Yu, BIAD’s chief architect, says he
had seen 30 proposals for the site by local
and foreign architects fail to win approval.
Breaking the streak required getting the
thumbs-up from “five architecture and five
preservation experts at the national level.”
Scheeren and BIAD broke down the
building’s mass, placing the largest galleries
inside a four-story plinth composed of staggered
volumes that recall Beijing’s mazelike
hutongs. The surface of the plinth is gray
stone, echoing traditional Chinese masonry,
but with thousands of small circular perforations
whose locations were determined by
projecting one of China’s most important
landscape paintings, the 14th-century Dwelling
in the Fuchun Mountains, onto the elevations.
Within the plinth are exhibition spaces,
including a column-free 18,300-square-foot
room. Additional galleries are in the basement.
On top of the plinth is the hotel, a
four-story donut wrapped in window-size
panes of glass with deeply recessed joint lines,
making the panes appear to float. A small
tower in the courtyard will contain an art
library, a lecture hall, and an artists’ lounge.
For Scheeren—most of whose current
projects are condo towers—the Guardian Art
Center could be a stepping-stone into a new
area of practice: designing for cultural institutions.
It also suggests that his decision to
move to Beijing in 2004—rather than build in
Asia as an outsider, like many western architects—is
paying off. ■
PHOTOGRAPHY: © MICHAEL LOOS (TOP); BURO OLE SCHEEREN (BOTTOM, 2)