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 Arnold Chan's deliberate renunciation of a personal style--a debatable virtue in an architect--is probably an absolute necessity for a great lighting designer. May 2001
So we learned from Corbu that light was the essential element of our medium. And yet great lighting design almost by definition is not always so apparent. But for those who need to know about it, the word has been out on Arnold Chan for a long time. The Hong Kong-born designer founded his London firm, Isometrix Lighting and Design, in 1984. Trained as an architect at London's Architectural Association, Chan says he got into light by accident, freelancing for the Italian lighting company iGuzzini and working on the design of their showrooms. After that he took a technical course. "My initial architectural training was indispensable for perceiving three dimensions and understanding space," says the 43-year-old. Chan's first important commission was from Joseph Ettedgui, of the women's clothing retailer Joseph, in London. Ettedgui paired Chan with architect Eva Jiricna, who in turn introduced him to Richard Rogers and Michael Hopkins. A dizzying array of clients, including architects and interior designers, followed. So how much expertise do you need to change a lightbulb? "The thing is, the techniques of lighting are now so advanced that only specialists who think like architects can produce good results," Chan says. It certainly seems arguable. Steel, glass, and elevators--though celebrated for the advancement of modern architecture--haven't progressed a lot in the 50 years since, for example, Lever House was completed. But artificial lighting has undergone a number of major advances in the past half century. Commercial lighting now includes a big incandescent family that embraces new tungsten halogen and low-voltage lamps. There are discharge lights that electrify a reactive gas, which have become important in retail design. Fluorescent lights of many sizes and shapes have new domestic and cost-saving applications. Fiber-optic lights are being used in places where a light source would formerly have been impossible. The latest and coolest type of lighting is high output light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which all the major fixture manufacturers are rushing to the market. In the context of rapid technical development, a good lighting designer today has become more than an engineer or product technician--and has to be skilled in more than just avoiding eyestrain and defeating glare. That's the challenge Chan set for himself. One of his current projects is a think-tank collaboration with industrial designer Ross Lovegrove for Airbus Industries' forthcoming superjumbo. Most plane interior design has been done in-house; Airbus decided to get advice outside the aircraft industry. The details are heavily embargoed, but Chan confides that he is trying to impart a sense of intimacy to passengers seated 12 across by giving them translucent screens that glow soothingly with differently hued LEDs--and perhaps even skylights. Chan's recent work in London is fascinating because it involves enhancing historical buildings, such as Selfridges department store. Lighting the exterior of an old landmark is a tricky problem, because the architecture is being taken beyond original intentions. For example, in Westminster Abbey the recent relighting scheme (by John Hugill at Thorn Lighting) inverts the daylight principle of shining light downward by directing artificial illumination upward. Here Hugill had to consider whether the shadows from ancient cornices and pinnacles made architectural sense projected above the forms. The inverted lighting seems to work here because it harks back to torchlit or lamplit streets of the past; the Abbey at night has now become a hymn to medieval street life. Selfridges exterior was more problematic. The 1909 store has a huge block-long, three-story colonnade atop a one-story plinth (Chicago School architect Daniel Burnham worked on the project). Chan's lighting has illuminated the mighty colonnade with lights pointing down from the cornice and up from the column bases, so the shadows duel with each other halfway. Strongly modeled by day, Selfridges stutters by night. "The project is incomplete," Chan concedes. "The phase on view now is just to bring the architecture back up to par." So far the highly lit facade does contrast with chiaroscuro shop windows below and with the store's main entrance canopy, which is dark but wonderfully set off with orange lights that look like dozens of glowing marmalade jars. In the design's final phase a further plane of light will be introduced. According to Chan, "Each window between the columns will become clear glass, showing a backdrop washed in different tints." In the last two years Chan has designed lighting for two hotels in London, the St. Martins Lane and the Sanderson. As with earlier Ian Schrager projects--the Delano, in Miami Beach, and the Mondrian, in Los Angeles--Chan collaborated with Philippe Starck and Schrager's design director Anda Andrei to create lighting unique to each hotel. At the St. Martins Lane, for example, all the colors of the rainbow seem to emerge from each headboard. They emanate from an indirect, diffused strip of red, yellow, and blue lights, like a short bank of TV projectors. This is wired to a small polished circular disk on the wall by the bedside labeled "LIGHT YOUR MOOD," which allows guests to adjust the illumination in their rooms to include the whole spectral Chromolume (the fictional lighting machine in Sunday in the Park with George). Chan has patented this expensive fixture, which is available on a limited basis through Isometrix at about $1,000 per yard for the strip of color projectors. "The favorite colors that guests stop at are pink, red, and violet," Chan says. The Sanderson, completed a year after the St. Martins Lane, has a more eclectic mix of features: screen-projected wave and pulse effects in the lobby; backlit holographic star-scapes in the elevators; and in the main restaurant, decorative Castiglione pendant lamps and wall sconces with glass shades. Chan's best idea is in the hallway corridors, where the only light beams up from the fioor through modestly sized translucent glass plates under every door with the room numbers painted on them. He has an excellent relationship with the Schrager team and delights in describing how he and Starck worked out the playful bulbs dangling over each table in the St. Martins Lane's Asia de Cuba restaurant. Chan recounts, "We took a supply of bulbs and had the antique filaments remade." The old fish restaurant J. Sheekey, in nearby St. Martins Court, represents a fertile collaboration between the clients, the designer--David Collins in this case--and Chan. Like Le Caprice and the Ivy, the other treasured London restaurants re-created and owned by Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, the memory of a great old restaurant was made to reblossom. (King and Corbin recently sold the three of them.) Chan's fundamental lighting device consists of a narrow-angle spot casting a small but intense pool of light in the center of each tablecloth. This sparkles the food and bounces friendly lighting that minimizes diners' sagging jowls and eye bags. J. Sheekey goes against the fashionable grain by being a multiroom restaurant. Different rooms allow for an impressive array of secondary lighting arrangements: plaster coves and coffers, Venetian glass shades around exposed lights, hanging cylindrical fabric shades. Corbin's philosophy that "restaurants should have as much shadow as light" is borne out by J. Sheekey and the Ivy, as well as almost all other fondly remembered places full of charm and atmosphere. Not far from J. Sheekey is Busaba Eathai, a Thai restaurant lit artfully by Chan. The dining room is dominated by cylindrical shades suspended from a heavily coffered ceiling of dark-stained wood. Each predictably contains a little Isometrix lighting machine: a metal ring with four candle bulbs to illuminate the shade and a lensed down-lighter to bounce radiance off the table. Deep shadows surround. Recent retail work by Chan in London includes several departments of Selfridges, such as the cosmetics hall, where his lighting discreetly but intensely teaches manners to individual companies' subservient counters; and Versace Jeans Couture, three tiers of selling space with rows of prominent spotlights arrayed theatrically under glass walkways around an atrium. The difference between having a subtle but stabbing and a blatant but modulated light source illustrates Chan's deliberate renunciation of personal style to fulfill the requirements of each job--a necessity for a great lighting designer. The women's clothing shop Jigsaw on New Bond Street, a few doors down from Versace Jeans, is an excellent example of Chan's fiexibility. He worked there with John Pawson, a celebrated minimalist who hates "too many blemishes," as Chan puts it. The designer developed a system of ceiling holes that allows four lights to shine through each opening. This is "the wok light," another Chan invention. The customer looking down the serene Jigsaw shop sees only fioating walls (translucent acrylic, lit from slots above), fioating shelves (cantilevered and recessed for rows of halogen lights that illuminate the folded clothing), and discreetly aligned ceiling holes. One would have to look straight up inside a ceiling hole to see the cluster of lights held in accurate display position by Longlife magnets on the inside of the spherical wok. Stage lighting was once the supreme manifestation of manipulative ambience: it paints the scene; it changes to adjust the mood for the audience while they just sit there. And that of course is its ultimate limitation: in the darkened auditorium the audience remains detached and unimmersed, never--in the famous phrase about yielding to staged reality--fully "suspending disbelief" about those onstage golden verandas, spangled dancing levels, bluish dramatic storms, and rosy dawns. Chan takes his atmosphere into the real world and makes it become our environment. His color-changing wall, translucent sheet, and dappled promenade aren't part of a remote spectacle; they are where we live and want to be. Disbelief becomes fully suspended--because once the lighting all around us has become as good as stage lighting, like nature it will probably go unnoticed even at its most remarkable. The design ought to be unnoticed. There should only be: "I had a terrific time." "She looked wonderful." "Let's go there again." At the edge of this powerful new suspension of disbelief is Arnold Chan. |
