Interview about Haw Par Villa Heritage Lighting, winner of the A' Lighting Products and Fixtures Design Award 2022
Haw Par Villa is a 8.5 ha conservation heritage park in Singapore built in the 1930s. Over the years, visitorship to the park fell steadily due to changing tastes and general neglect. The brief was to use lighting to enliven the stories for the new generation and make them relevant again. As the lighting design and main implementation consultant, Illuminating Asia transformed over 20 heritage artefacts through artful lighting, and made the park welcoming. It's a culmination of electrical engineering, story-telling, lighting design, and problem-solving.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsBy combining lighting effects and projected graphical artworks of the various key note stories on to the forefront of the park, we seek to provide a sneak peak for visitors and passerbys. Hence, encouraging them to explore the historical sculptures and stories in the park.
We need to survey the landscape throughly, work closely with clients and stakeholders to understand all limitation and possibilities (creative, innovative or unconventional methods). Thereafter to work with multiple lighting suppliers and contractors to explore methods of lighting deployment from afar or near point to achieve the intended effect on the sculptures / stories.
In the night, due to various limitations, we have to be selective of the most important and pertinent scenes to highlight. The illumination covers the scluptures that offers the most vivid expressions that may connect easily with a viewer.
A master lighting plan was created. We had to constantly move between micro perspective to macro views of the entire space, as we go about the design, recommendation, trials and final deployment.
As the sculptures are very colourful and the expressions of various figurines are extremely vivid, the lighitng colour tone needs to achieve clarity while not giving too much of a glare. The colour tone also downplay areas where certain figurines might have looked too daunting to the visitors.
It was an extremely intense exercise given the scale of this project. This approach seeks to ensure we acheive the most solution a the first instance we work on one specific area. This allow us to check in with all stakeholders on a viable method of statement in accomplishing our design intent, while tackling the site limitations.
By selecting the right location within the park is the most crucial to achieve this balance. Moving colourful lights are often dynamic and should be used at only key locations sparingly to make the space feels energetic. Other areas where it is more serious or where we want people to appreciate the culture better, the static lighting takes over. This contrast of lighting application makes the entire space feels refreshing and not too homogeneous.
We start with a thinking and engineering process of using only the least amount of light fixtures to illuminate a given space. We constantly challenge ourselves if one light fitting can achieve the ideal result we want a visitor to feel. Through this bottom up approach, we had already seek to minimise the light fittings and power consumption to be at the base minimum. This directly lead to positive energy efficiency and project effectiveness.
This would be the use of gobo projection at the main entrance of Haw Par Villa. The first problem we want to achieve is how to bring in more visitors into the park at night to experience the cultural heritage. Through lighting art displays, we bring the stories to life, stopping people in the tracks to take photos or even start asking whats there in the park. To accomplish the projection, we had to apply geometry, electrical and civil engineering practices to identify the most optimal positions to place the GOBO projectors. And the result as as what we all have seen at the entrance; the one and only Singapore public permanenent projection mapping light show.
Yes. As the younger generation get disinterested or disconnected to their traditions or history; making things abit more interactive with such light shows revitalises history in a way the younger generation appreciates easily. This can help perserve not only the heritage spaces, but allowing the stories a better chance of reflourishing in the future as people retains this memory.
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