Licht Kunst Licht Publishes Volume 5 of their Work Reports Series

The office of Licht Kunst Licht has been publishing its completed projects in the form of work reports since 2005. Now the fifth volume “Licht Kunst Licht 5 – Lighting Design for Architecture” has been published – a special milestone in the history of the multi-award-winning, international lighting design office. Founded simultaneously in Bonn and Berlin in 1991 by Andreas Schulz, the multidisciplinary team has grown to 38 employees from the fields of lighting design, architecture, interior design, electrical engineering, scenography and product design. In the meantime, Licht Kunst Licht has a total of four locations with offices in Bonn, Berlin, Barcelona and Bangalore and is active in a wide range of projects.

Licht Kunst Licht 5 is an impressively comprehensive work of 340 pages. It documents the high quality and technical lighting expertise in the designs and at the same time underlines the consistency with which Licht Kunst Licht pursues its design approach. “We understand light as an integral part of architecture and always try to realize our projects with as few elements as possible in order to focus on the overall atmosphere,” says Andreas Schulz, explaining a premise of his office‘s work. The respectful and analytical view of the architectural design or the existing built space forms a solid foundation for aesthetically, functionally, and technically sophisticated lighting concepts. Examples include the Oscar Niemeyer Sphere in Leipzig, the National Museum of Qatar in Doha, and the Baden-Württemberg State Parliament in Stuttgart – three of the 18 selected projects presented in the new work report in text and images, with large-format illustrations and comparisons of day and night views. The complexity and special challenges in the design processes for projects such as the German Ivory Museum or the Underground Bicycle Parking Garage on the Novartis Campus in Basel are vividly illustrated using scaled models, as well as 1:1 mock-ups.

Licht Kunst Licht, however, does not exclusively cater to rational lighting design that is tied to architecture. “Our publication shows the entire spectrum of our work and also documents many projects that are known through other press releases, and above all, through the many international architecture and lighting awards that these projects have won,” says the editor Prof. Andreas Schulz. After all, the variety of projects has grown strongly over the years, and the designs have ranged from almost sculptural, or object-like to even interactive medium facades. Thus, Licht Kunst Licht designs, among other things, ambitious outdoor projects that can be identity-forming for the respective location and leave a lasting mark on the atmosphere of the surroundings by means of the symbolic lighting effect. This is documented in detail in the book in the Water Tower in Luxembourg and the unique ensemble of One Shenzhen Bay in China.

The luminaire development department is also featured in the new work report and presents not only the lighting design competence of Licht Kunst Licht but also its special expertise in product design.

In a separate chapter, for the first time, the office introduces selected projects on which the team is currently working. The informative collages include impressions of the Elbtower in Hamburg, the Sagrada Família Basilica in Barcelona, and the large-scale Frankfurt Airport Terminal 3 project.

In her introduction “Light – Space – Art”, Dr. Vera Simone Bader, art historian and research associate at the Architectural Museum of the Technical University Munich, addresses the questions of how light functions in space and spaces with light and invites a discourse on the theory and background of design with light. Using examples from history, art, and architecture, she illustrates the different ways in which light can be perceived on an emotional and aesthetic level.

In keeping with tradition, the fifth volume was once again designed in collaboration with the dedicated team from the Cologne-based studio polylog (formerly F1rstdesign) and, like its predecessors, is published by av edition in Stuttgart. Just like in 2016, the release of the book is to be celebrated again this year: A big book release party will take place in late summer in Berlin.