Urban lighting projects

Project

268606

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Submitted

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS : existing completed examples

Project title

Urban lighting projects

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Description

Our projects play with light, becoming an instrument for the re-enchantment of urban experience, the most powerful tool to build a reinvent new places to meet and share. We live with a desire to be surprised and to be surprised by something new. The boredom born of an excess of flat, homogeneous and globalised information produces in us the need to explore new unique environments, where the magic and the event of surprise transform our daily, professional and personal reality. 

Where was your project implemented in the EU?

When was your project implemented?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Which programme(s) or fund(s)? Provide the name of the programme(s)/fund(s), the strand/action line as relevant and the year.

Please provide a summary of your project

The main historic centres of our country have been illuminated with our designs for 15 years, in places as important as Serrano, Preciados and Mayor streets, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Plaza Octavia in Sant Cugat del Vallés, Paseo de la Independencia, Plaza Paraíso and San Felipe in Zaragoza, among many others. We are currently developing international projects, participating in lighting festivals all over the world. We have designed different lighting artistic installations, with the aim to dress the city at Christmas time, seductive and decked out in all its finery. All of them were projected as different ways, but they have a common objetive, occupiying the city with simple lighting units: dots, lines, strips and meshes, taking advantage of the capability to build luminic athmospheres of urban scale. Our lighting installations with a periodical or ephemeral character, allow us to explore the possibilities to transform public space. All of them were born as catalizers of events, with all the impact strentgh that event has as something not usual. Their creation context accepts a high level of expressivity and investigation, and in each one we tried to work with the relation between expressive will and geometrical and luminic qualities of their designs. We worked with elements that come from light filigrees to simple luminic emitters, based on elemental geometries. This simplification tries to find a more essential and abstract character, but allways enriched with color tools. They avoid simple repetition of traditional motis but build urban luminic installations with all the spatial dimension of happiness. Bells, Confetti, Chimes, BaumHaus, Stars, Auroras, Paradise Tree…among many ohers, perform in different spaces as part of the same family in order to reinvent the place to meet and share.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability and how these have been met

In each of the projects we try to provide solutions or alternatives with sustainable materials and LED technology, concluding in efficient and high quality works. Morover, ligt art installations also use the largest, most economical and sustainable lighting source we have: the sun. For example, “Confetti” is a scenery system that works for the city 24h. a day as a reducer of remaining light, noise attenuation, and a comedian-entertainer of urban theater, colonizing the gaps through coloured and circular pieces of recycled plastic, opaque and translucent; so the illumination is generated from the reception in these plates of all existing light sources in the surrounding area, public and private, of projector and supporting lamps, and of course, the greatest and cheapest we have in Spain, the sun.  In “Bells”, we play with the materials, like a mirror, the outer face of the bell reflects the sky and the surroundings, minimising its presence, but when the visitor enters, the polished steel amplifies each surrounding lighting effect, multiplying and fusing the reflections of the installation and the citizen.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met

Each of the projects is unique in terms of its spatial and formal conception, development and design, always playing with the illusion of creating a space of event, and of discovering everyday places under a new luminous atmosphere. The projects are in themselves an experience for all the senses; there are designs that function as an icon or reference in the place, artistic or sculptural pieces with evocative geometries such as BAUMhaus and Arbol de Paraíso. Other designs also allow visitors to enter into them, such as the Bells (Kaleidoscope, Rose Window and Xylophone), which act as catalysts at night as well as during the day.  Other projects play with this interaction with the citizen, constructing a new luminous sky in streets and squares, such as Confetti, Stars, Bells and Auroras.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion and how these have been met

This projects imply historical and spatial inclusion, they compound an urban itinerary, reinforcing interesting points in the historical center of the cities, as well as others in the outskirts that had gone unnoticed. “BAUMhaus” is located at one of the entrance gates to Madrid, so it aims to be a powerful icon that creates a reference in the place, and even as an artistic or sculptural piece of metallic and crystalline geometries, based on Feininger´s drawings for Bauhaus. The Tree of Paradise, located in one of the most important nodes of Zaragoza, is light and life, based on neuronal drawings of Ramón y Cajal, our Nobel prize. They approximate culture and science to city.  But also, the interventions impy a social and cultural inclusión too. “Bells” are made of the differences of people who think in very different ways, but who meet and congregate under dreams, under light, under sound, under colour, and who are reflected in a thousand ways in a giant kaleidoscope made of the faces of all those who look out.  Bells of light that in turn are made by the multiple vision of architects who explore new tangent paths to the one that until now led us all, by engineers who approach art, and by manufacturers of fairground lights who now make crafts with CNC.  Today we do not know how we will live together, but it is up to us to propose it. And we propose to build magic bells of light, we propose to come together under a kaleidoscopic, shared reality, which is in our surroundings but which we now discover to be magical, plural, and different.

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

Light becomes an instrument for the re-enchantment of urban experience, the most powerful tool to build a reinvent new places to meet and share. We live with a desire to be surprised and to be surprised by something new.  The boredom born of an excess of flat, homogeneous and globalised information produces in us the need to explore new unique environments, where the magic and the event of surprise transform our daily, professional and personal reality. This search can be individual, but more and more we look for support from the group, and its embodiment can be physical or virtual, if this word has any meaning today. We are witnessing a moment in which we have the possibility of making remoteness close, but in this eagerness we have run the risk of making closeness distant. Our relationships may be distant, but we must not neglect those close to us. This is where we need references in the city, works of illumination in the territory that prevent us from getting lost, that build new experiences and guide us to the place where the group lives together, that make the voices, longings and dreams of a collective that inhabits a territory resonate, and that therefore make multiple sounds and melodies that are always different.

Please explain the way citizens benefiting from or affected by the project and civil society have been involved in the project and what has been the impact of this involvement on the project

The significance of our work includes, in addition to the conceptual design, a comprehensive design development and follow-up service with the lighting concessionaires with whom each municipality has contracted the manufacture and installation. However, we can also offer a joint service with manufacturing and installation companies. All of this with the aim of adapting the design to the production systems that each company has, thus facilitating the work of supervision and coordination for the local councils, and always ensuring that the result is optimal and spectacular. We can be proud to have received numerous national and international awards for all this work, and to have been published in the main design magazines and covers, contributing to position these cities in the international winter tourism panorama, and in the great centres of cultural offer in the public space. However, the most significant recognition is the great acceptance of our work among the citizens. Each lighting project belongs to each city and each citizen, but they also have the opportunity to travel between different places, like a suitcase that gathers the experiences of all of them and makes them part of the same family. The urban light projects become an active system which dialogues and interacts with citizens, making to be directly involved in the proccess of rediscovering their own cities.

Please highlight the innovative character of the project

Our line of work consists of developing absolutely innovative and exclusive designs for each city, with installations for specific locations, and of course always tailored to the possibilities or investment desired. Each of the lighting projects is innovative in terms of its spatial and formal conception, development and design, as for example in BaumHaus and Paradise Tree, with truncated cone structures up to 24 metres high, or Estrellas, creating a band of lighting 45 metres wide, the largest illuminated in Spain, or Campanadas, generating a form of catenary in the street that changes in tone and intensity with the passage of people, as if it were the vital pulse of the city.  In addition, he is always committed to approaches that combine art and technology, as in Paradise Tree, in which the lighting system is programmed in such a way that a series of vital impulses run through the tree, fed by a nucleus at the apex, connecting the different nodes along the cone that pulsate as they pass by. In other installations, presence detectors are installed so that the lighting is activated or intensified as visitors pass through. In other projects, such as Auroras, innovation goes hand in hand with materials. Technically they are formed by assembled modules made with LED technology programmed pixel by pixel, and reinforced with plastic meshes to cause a more luminous and spectacular effect. These frames curve and fold to form the auroras, which are suspended in the square.

Please explain how the project led to results or learnings which could be transferred to other interested parties

These new urban practices that are being developed in nocturnal scenarios are capable of eliminating the more serious and formal tone that the city may appear to have, in order to show its more dynamic and interactive face. Their power is even capable of reversing situations of sadness and anguish such as that produced by the pandemic. Projects such as Stars or Auroras aim to restore hope and illusion to citizens in such a tough year by paying metaphorical tribute to the covi-19 victims or by being inspired by all those rainbow drawings children have placed on their windows during the time of the pandemic, proposing a trip to new landscapes with games of light and color. In the context of the culture of spectacle, of the ephemeral, of the programmed, artificial light as an artistic element is used as a powerful tool for transforming the city. Thus, the city becomes a veritable experimental laboratory, an open-air nocturnal art stage, where buildings are transformed into blank canvases to be painted with light and architectural structures into magical light sculptures. Its power to transform the city is undeniable and its potential goes beyond the city itself to become a structuring tool. Our projects can be considered an unfinished work, after their design and installation, which makes sense through its interaction with the environment, the context and the citizens, and whose survival and its effects go beyond its ephemeral stay. Even their temporariness is an added value in itself, as permanence could make them go unnoticed. On the other hand, night favours the effects of light on the city, which can always make it different, so there are no limits to creativity.

Is an evaluation report or any relevant independent evaluation source available?

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the Awards more than once under the same category and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.