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Letchworth Garden City lighting scheme opens
July 2010: Letchworth Garden City has officially unveiled its revamped and relit town centre. Sutton Vane Associates has designed lighting intended to help encourage a night time economy to develop and restore Letchworth as a destination. The Street Scene scheme funded by Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation includes specially designed lighting columns which have bronze painted bases and are faced with wood that matches the street furniture, but also contain controls for CCTV and traffic signals. They support lanterns which can be dimmed remotely. Three beacons set within a water feature form the symbolic heart of the scheme. |
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Designer and engineer to exchange roles
July 2010: Sutton Vane Associates lighting designer Fay Berry will trade places with Daniel Moorley, a highway lighting Engineer at Bournemouth Borough Council for a day’s job swap. The pair will recount the experience of taking on each other’s professional roles at the Institution of Lighting Engineers’ 2010 Annual Conference, on 23 September, which takes place at the Chesford Grange Hotel in Warwickshire. Sutton Vane Associates founder Mark Sutton Vane will also be speaking at the conference. Taking its inspiration from the TV show Wife Swap the exercise organised by the ILE and the Professional Lighting Designers’ Association is intended as a bit of fun but should help bring both arms of the lighting professional closer together. Details of the conference can be found at www.ile.org.uk/progress. |
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Prince Charles views Leighton House project
June 2010: The Prince of Wales witnessed the electric lighting change from exactly the way it was in 1896 to a modern event setting designed to highlight architectural features at Leighton House in London, when he was given a tour of the museum recently to mark its restoration. The lighting, designed by Sutton Vane Associates reveals unseen architectural detail and includes fittings designed after extensive research revealed that contrary to modern lighting practice Frederic, Lord Leighton’s lighting pride and joy, the ‘gasolier’ in the building’s famed Arab Hall, was designed to show off its electric ‘bulbs’, then an ostentatious novelty. Contemporary photographs formed part of the detailed research used to recreate Victorian lighting levels in the house, including the artist’s studio, while modern controls allow the building to operate at today’s standards. (See Portfolio) |
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Deep secret revealed
June 2010: The Natural History Museum's exhibition, The Deep (May-September 2010) was designed to reveal a largely unexplored world 11,000 metres below the ocean and the strange creatures that have adapted to life there, using real specimens and interactive displays. Sutton Vane Associates lit the exhibition including its exhibition's centre piece, Whale Fall Community. It features stunning footage of deep sea creatures that live on whale carcasses projected on to a real sperm whale skeleton atop a glass plinth. This created a number of lighting challenges, not least the problem of reflection. It was also important that the skeleton could be seen close to and from a distance: the light projections had to be visible without dominating the ‘submarine’ scene created with low ambient lighting and blue filters. A mixture of the museum's existing fittings and others designed to 'plug and play' were used to keep costs down while also reducing installation time to just three days. A special housing was created for linear LEDs with narrow beam optics that would illuminate the whale but could not be seen by visitors, and these were put under DMX control so that they could be dimmed easily. |
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Visit includes enlightenment
June 2010: Mark Sutton Vane recently passed on advice on lighting to visitors from France as part of the Professionals UK educational programme, at the request of English Heritage. The group of engineering undergraduates heard how lighting designers and engineers can coordinate their efforts to help create sustainable lighting. |
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Sutton Vane leads SLL master class
May 2010: Lighting designers should take a lead in influencing the way we tackle climate change and other environmental issues relating to energy use, according to Sutton Vane Associates principal Mark Sutton Vane. Leading the 27 May, 2010 Society of Light and Lighting master class on sustainable lighting at the Wellcome Collection in London, Mark said that the solutions the industry has to come up with would need to be inventive, flexible, targeted and non-prescriptive. ‘The aim should be better lighting, not necessarily less but well designed not only to save energy but also to provide economies over time and to improve the lives both of town and country dwellers. This will become increasingly important to the UK’s energy security as well as making our urban areas safer while reducing waste and reversing at least part of the damage we currently do to our environment,’ he said. |
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Martin and Jones become senior designers
May 2010: Sutton Vane Associates has promoted Toria Martin and Robert Jones to senior designer. Toria Martin’s current projects include the park and public realm aspects of the 2012 Olympics and the National Museum of Oman, while Robert Jones’s include the Hull Swing Bridge, the Massar Discovery Centre in Damascus, and the exterior of the Geffrye Museum in London. Practice principal Mark Sutton Vane commented: 'We are very fortunate at Sutton Vane Associates to have a team that combines a broad range of skills. Both Toria and Rob have contributed immensely to the practice's continuing growth and we are looking forward to even more good work as Sutton Vane Associates celebrates its fifteenth birthday, this year.’ |
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SLL article blasts ‘spec busting’ contractors
April 2010: Contractors who substitute inferior fittings to make ‘savings’ are wasting clients’ money, says Mark Sutton Vane, who lashed out at the practice known as spec busting in a recent article for the Society of Lighting and Lighting Newsletter.
‘The habit of ignoring design specifications and substituting cheap, ‘no-name’ fittings in order to pocket the difference is so widespread in design and build that it is regarded as inevitable,’ says Sutton Vane. ‘Spec busting happens well into the design process. Long before it takes place, the client will have paid a lighting designer to find the best possible scheme to satisfy all criteria including the budget. Fittings and suppliers will have been specified because the lighting designer knows that they will perform as they should and will deliver value to the client. That has all been done. So when a contractor – who is not a lighting designer – tries to create “savings”, the client should be asking who, exactly, is going to benefit? Are they real savings or might using a cheaper, probably inferior fitting from a no-name source with an unknown inventory just possibly cost a bit more in the long run? And if so, who is going to pay? Not the contractor, that’s for sure’.
Sutton Vane warned that ‘a first-rate scheme can end up looking and performing like a third-rate scheme, and by subverting the lighting design the contractor wastes at least part of the lighting designer’s fee. On top of that, whatever the contractor succeeds in skimming off comes out of the client’s pocket.’
On the other hand, he said, there are times when modifying the change makes sense. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable for anyone commissioning a building, especially someone who has not done so often, to look to the experts for advice. The unexpected is to be expected with all building projects and there are times when unforeseen groundwork, for example, means that genuine cost savings have to made further into the build. This is an example of when modifying the spec is legitimate. This is also when contractors can really be helpful, as the good ones often are, by using their knowledge to come up with practical solutions. All too often, however, clients pay the price for being unable to distinguish between the genuinely independent advice of a lighting designer and the covert sales talk of a contractor, or supplier, dressed up as lighting consultancy’. |
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Frankfurt meeting discusses sustainable lighting
April 2010. The gigantic Messe Frankfurt 2010 trade fair provided the backdrop for a Professional Lighting Designers’ Association meeting on sustainability recently attended by Sutton Vane Associates director Michael Grubb. ‘It is very gratifying to see so much work going into such an important issue,’ said Michael. ‘Sustainable lighting is rising to the top of the energy agenda.’ He also took the opportunity to take in the show. ‘Manufacturers have thankfully concentrated on producing better, more stable white light LED products with more attention on performance, optics, distribution and the general consistency,’ he commented. ‘It was a welcome relief to the huge amount of colour changing products that were on display last time! It was like a giant disco,’ he joked. |
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Professional lighting designers meet in NY
March 2010: Critical issues that will shape the future of lighting design were discussed recently at a gathering of leading lighting designers from either side of the Atlantic, in New York. The Professional Lighting Designers’ Association brought together industry leaders including Sutton Vane Associates director Michael Grubb at Parsons The New School for Design on 25 February. ‘It is clear to me that sustainability will remain at the heart of good lighting practice,’ he said. |
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Grubb makes Massar workshop child’s play
February 2010: Sutton Vane Associates director Michael Grubb and senior designer Robert Jones led a lighting workshop for Syrian children being treated for cancer, recently. The workshop was the first use of the prototyping centre at the Massar Discovery Centre in Damascus, which is still under construction and has been designed as a way of combining scientific education and entertainment for children. The session included creating miniature gobos and light painting. ‘The aim was to involve the kids and teach them about both the science and art of lighting in a fun way,’ said Michael. Sutton Vane Associates is designing all lighting associated with the centre. |
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McBride-Bergh joins design team
January 2010: Emily McBride-Bergh recently joined the design team at Sutton Vane Associates. She gained her Master’s Degree in Architectural Lighting Design at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, having previously studied Interior Design in Canada. Her thesis was in lighting historical buildings based on Sutton Vane Associates’ scheme for Newcastle Cathedral. |
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Grubb talks on low energy lighting
March 2010: Sutton Vane Associates director Michael Grubb was among the experts on sustainability who took part in the recent Low Energy Lighting Conference, hosted in London by Lighting Magazine, the Architect’s Journal and Retail Week. Grubb discussed topics such as future design regulations, what constitutes sustainable design and emerging technologies as part of panel of thought leaders. |
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Cairo lighting project best seen by camel
Feb 2010: Preparations are well under way for the opening in 2011 of the new Hurghada Sound and Light experience in Egypt, according to Sutton Vane Associates director Michael Grubb , who recently carried out an inspection of tourist attraction by camel. ‘Lighting will be used for way finding, for storytelling and for general entertainment at Hurgada,’ explains Michael. ‘A lot of exciting lighting effects will be used as visitors navigate through the site, which is in effect a visually exciting history lesson’.
Sutton Vane Associates developed a lighting master plan for the entire site, to ensure that all areas are coordinated including car parks, routes, and retail areas. ‘There is a huge AV show which incorporates special effects, as well as food and retail outlets that need to be lit,’ says Michael. ‘We provided detail designs for all of the publicly accessible spaces, including the main AV show. The recent visit was to see how the equipment has already been integrated into the desert. A camel proved to be the best way to see it all: it’s a very big and very exciting project!’ |
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