A Turnip Lamp
Burns for hours, stays moist, and outdoors the flame is protected from the winds…
And, if you get hungry, you can roast and eat the turnip.
Grounding Practice: Speculations on Affect and Environment
October 20, 2011
While lighting design has finally evolved into a legitimate, recognized field of practice, its evolution as a field of study is lagging behind. There is as yet no cannon: no body of principles accepted as axiomatic or universally binding in our field of study. Nor do we have a comprehensive list of texts deemed relevant to our field. There is practice, lots of practice. Some practitioners have taken the time to document and present their work to the benefit of our and neighboring fields. However, we do not, as yet, have the tools for transforming the lessons learned from individuals’ lighting practice into a formal knowledge base. We are still in the early stages of building a conceptual framework and models of discourse that can contribute to the development of a rich and nuanced cannon.
“Available Light” a collaborative work
October 15th, 2011
Tillett Lighting Design in collaboration with Choreographers Jon Kinzel and Jodi Melnick created “Available Light” for Open House New York 2011.
How can the City be Better Illuminated?
September 19th, 2011
A talk by Linnaea Tillett and Deborah Gans for Urban Design Week 2011, the Institute for Urban Design, on September 19th, 2011.
Lines of Inquiry: Realigning Expectations of Historic Lighting
September 15, 2011
Significant as the advances in lighting technology have been, they are outstripped by our ideas of what we want historic lighting to achieve. Historic lighting is increasingly expected to fulfill a bulging portfolio of desires: to express the sublimity of memory; bring out detail in form through subtle plays of light and shadow; conform to LEED standards; meet the expectations of users who spend their work lives in evenly-lit bright spaces; require low-maintenance; cost as little as possible; and be programmatically flexible so as to address multipurpose needs—i.e., performance, respite, worship, scholarship, etc.
From the perspective of a lighting designer and environmental psychologist, the assumption that a skillful use of technology combined with a clear delineation of program can accomplish a satisfactory outcome has reached its limits. It is time to step back and open up a dialogue that goes beyond the usual statements about desires, needs and budget. Simply put—we are going to have to make some choices. If we don’t make them, the technological limitations will make them for us. I propose some lines of inquiry to assist in making those choices…
Harvard Graduate School of Design book features Tillett Lighting Design
From “Accumulations” by Julia Czerniak, Gareth Doherty, Ed., New Geographies, 3: Urbanisms of Color, Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2011.
Featuring the Syracuse, New York project with Tillett Lighting Design, Pentagram and Barton & Loguidice.
“Tillett’s lighting fixtures, limited to conventional pole-mounted luminaries and illuminating bollards, are nonetheless custom colored and grouped into formations that produce powerful effects. These vertical clusters mark entrances to institutions and other significant spots along the route, visible even during the winter of America’s snowiest city…Tillett Lighting’s use of luminous paint, a paint that gives off visible light, is planned for newly exposed parti-walls, along beam surfaces in parking garages, and as a component of public murals. Activated by headlights and the sun’s lower rays, these measures bring color into the city in fleeting ways.”
“Let There Be Night”
An article featuring Linnaea Tillett in the July/August 2011 a href=“http://www.gardendesign.com/” rel=“external”>Garden Design magazine.
Reflections on Richard Kelly’s Landscape Lighting
Reflections on Richard Kelly’s Landscape Lighting by Linnaea Tillett and Kate Gardner
To reflect upon Richard Kelly’s landscape lighting engenders a somewhat speculative frame of mind. Kelly himself never treated landscape lighting as a subspecies of illuminating art. But, from archival material I’ve gleaned some clues as to how he addressed the particular discipline we’ve come to call landscape lighting. I tender this essay in the spirit of sparking further research and discussion on this topic.
As a working designer who specializes in landscape lighting, my concern is not only the historical Kelly, but what he may offer us today. Similar to Kelly in his time, we find ourselves in great transition, with new technology presenting new possibilities. But today, landscape lighting faces a tall order—it must be functional, evocative, and synchronized with urgent efforts to use less electricity and limit light’s negative ecological consequences…
Notes from Light Symposium 2010 in Stockholm, Sweden.
November 15th, 2010
Two Mondays ago I returned from Stockholm, where I was attending an international 3-day conference, a gathering of scientists, urban planners, lighting designers, architects, engineers, landscape designers and academics; the event was called “Light Symposium: Natural Light – Daylight and artificial light for mankind.” It was a series of conversations on the barriers we face as we try to incorporate new technology in lighting even as we reduce our energy consumption; on the problems we have caused by embracing these technologies, almost certainly prematurely; and on the importance, safety and future potential of day-lighting our interiors. Interestingly I was one of only three Americans at the conference, which included many of the scions of the international lighting community as well as students and practitioners from all over Europe, Australia and China.
I was there as an environmental psychologist, a lighting designer and an American. The first morning’s lectures were as distressing as they are invisible here in the US. The Italian astronomer Ferdinando Patat of the University of Padua spoke about the very real disappearance, globally, of “astral windows,” dark spaces that allow us to see the sky at night. Dr. Abraham Haim, a Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Haifa, explained the effect of losing the “dark phase” in our circadian systems, where over-lighting inhibits production of the hormone melatonin, one of the most important regulators in the human body. In my comments that morning I pointed out that light is both a condition of the world as well as a social phenomenon, and while much of my work addresses the psychological issues of fear and anxiety in urban environments at night, an even more pressing issue is that we have come to expect a level of visual spectacle in our night lighting, calling for ever brighter, more lit spaces. I also reviewed some of the many documented environmental effects of nighttime illumination on the communication, reproduction, orientation, migration and hibernation patterns in multiple species, including, astoundingly, aquatic animals. All of us – the astronomer, the biologist and I, as well as most of the speakers on Days 2 and 3 – agree that there is, and there must be, a future solution that maintains safety in our cities with less light; with design and engineering more nuanced, more thoughtful and more careful than what we live with now.
