Light+Architecture

Artist Bill Pechet has collaborated with lighting co-designer Chris Pekar of Lightworks and Lumenpulse to create the 35-foot-tall, 31-foot-wide “Emptyful” sculpture in the Millennium Library Plaza in Winnipeg, Canada.



“Lighting for ‘Emptyful’ had to be slender, discreet and powerful,” says Pechet. “We brought Lumenpulse into the process early and designed the beam with their fixtures in mind.” A total of 28 Lumenfacade color-changing LED luminaires are secured on each side of an H-beam, half pointing up to accent the fog, and half pointing down to light a curtain of water cascading down into a 500-gallon tank below.



The stunning effect has mesmerized hundreds of people who have come to visit the piece. “It was influenced by the phenomenon of weather and human endeavor,” Pechet says. “When you first visit Winnipeg, it can appear empty and open, set amidst the vastness of prairie and sky. But within, the city is full of creative energy.”

The color-changing luminaires are set to 18 summer and 9 winter sequences, and each lasts for one to two minutes. Lumenpulse’s Lumenfacade RGB fixtures are designed for grazing or floodlighting exterior surfaces with color.

source: Orbit Design Studio

One of the most challenging components of any corporate workplace is to transmit and unfold the brand into an interior space. How do you create something contemporary from a brand that has been established decades ago (1967) and still resonate with its original values but at the same time inform the current vision and goals? Welcome to the IBM Software Executive Briefing Center in Rome, designed by Iosa Ghini Associati. Take a look at a transformed interior environment that still speaks to Paul Rand’s graphic and visual value of this iconic global brand. A true testament to the thinking forward mentality that IBM lives by.



This renovation speaks to technology while providing the proper architectural elements to support the spatial program requested by IBM. Groupings of parallel lines blanket the backdrop and provide rhythm with the foreground. These lines catch your eye and lead you through the space. A single bold back-lit line spans the floor and acts as your tour guide.



The color palette is simple, however the energy of the space is created through strategically placed lighting elements. Colored lights form a grid pattern and reflect against the smooth, continuous white ceiling, walls and floor. The ceiling opens up to a recessed cove light and forms an interesting shape against the surrounding linear design language that is iconic to its original eight-striped logo mark. The executive board room highlights a different ceiling element which contrasts the consistency of gyp board; rather we see a grid suspended below an exposed ceiling. The ceiling height appears lower here, perhaps to provide focus to such a serious room.




Massimo Iosa Ghini says: ‘the IBM software executive briefing program is designed to provide professionally managed events and to maximize the value of time that customers spend in IBM. any “briefing” usually includes presentations and demonstrations to bring customers to run events which they participate. listening, discussing and illustrating how the new IBM technologies can be helpful in facing and resolving technical and business issues, make people away from the traditional concept of
communication, to get closer to a place of useful comparison: a new agora’



Massimo Iosa Ghini says: “I tried to configure a place conceived as a new agora, capable of encouraging and stimulating productive discussion, in a dimension of communication that gets away from traditional parameters, making virtual interface scenarios the protagonists”.