Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My name's Jonathan Spiers. I'm a lighting designer. I trained initially
in architecture and I'm a qualified architect. We have two studios, one in
London and one in Edinborough, Scotland, where I live, and we run a company
called Spiers and Major. One of the principals that we work very, very hard
at in terms of some of the solutions for our spaces, is if you have good
architecture, if you have great architecture you shouldn't see the
equivalent. We're interested in trying to conceal and hide equipment away
so that you end up with a luminous building. You end up with a building
where the shapes and forms are expressed in the right way to give the
character of the space which we're trying to achieve that the client's
looking for.
With the Sands Bethworks Project in Philadelphia, it was a project that, I
mean, we've lit industrial edifices before in Europe, the first one we've
done in North America, and there it was all about the dignity of the
project, the dignity of the people that worked in the Bethlehem Steel Blast
Furnaces and so we were very keen that whilst this was no longer working
and there were many people lost their jobs when it all closed down, that we
still wanted to maintain some dignity and some respect for both the
edifices themselves as well as the people that used to work there and try
and get some pride back, and so part of the story line that we evolved into
that was where the building, the structures themselves would not always be
lit, that sometimes they would recede back into the darkness. They would go
to sleep. They would die in a way, and it would disappear and then they
would start to come alive and be illuminated and grow and then just again
slowly go back into the darkness, and we were trying to get a story into
there that talked about revealing something that was lost, and then you can
start to experience it in a way and then you'd lose it again, and then it
comes back. And certainly the reaction we've had from the people in
Bethlehem has been phenomenal. They think it's marvelous.
And for a client from Las Vegas, who you'd think would be looking for
razzmatazz and power and all the rest of it, they too were very convinced
that this was a story that evoked a quality and a character that spoke of
then their destination that they wanted to develop. So these kinds of
things are what we get excited about and spend time thinking about in the
studio.