CANADIAN PARLIAMENT - WEST BLOCK

Book Excerpt – High On Light + Architecture (2021)

Both aboveground inside West Block on Ottawa’s Parlia- ment Hill and deep beneath its Victorian High Gothic-style structure are intensely modern Committee Rooms. These spaces demand both advanced technical lighting for tel- evision broadcasts and clean aesthetics befitting a for- mal government ambiance. Innovative, elegant, luminaire asseblies simultaneously illuminate these perfect meet- ing places and negate the need for conventional, visually oppressive television studio lighting racks. Each seating position in the subterranean Committee Rooms must be lit to the exacting standards of high-definition cameras: both the background and subject must be illuminated with precise aiming angles. The rooms are also used for official receptions and events with theater-style seating. To achieve this functional and human-centric aesthetic balance, highly custom luminaires are installed in layers behind perforated, star-like panels, creating a tapestry of light: the first radiating like an artificial sky; the second concealing glare-controlled spotlights strategically dis- tributed and focused for broadcast sessions.

Office for Visual Interaction: Lighting Design & Process

Product Copy – Amazon

The Office for Visual Interaction (OVI) has created some of the world’s most inventive lighting design, illuminating prominent buildings around the globe. The New York Times building, the United States Air Force Memorial, street lighting for the City of New York, the historic Rookery Building in Chicago and the Scottish Parliament are just a few examples from the OVI portfolio that have captivated designers and the public alike. As the name implies, OVI is inspired by light’s interaction with finishes and materials, so that light and shadow become a natural extension of the architectural language, integrated seamlessly into the building’s structure, rather than applied as an additional element. Masterfully designed and illustrated with more than 400 images, sketches and graphics, this book is an essential companion to the art and science of lighting design, and an in-depth account of one of the world’s leading architectural lighting design firms.

KAPSARC

Winning Award Submission – 2020 LIT Lighting Design Awards

Situated on the northern edge of Riyadh is an oasis of organic design: a 500,000+ square meter complex, a stretched cellular structure that evokes the dunes in the surrounding desert. It spills outward from the Place of Icon, the nucelal open-air plaza whose overhead canopies usher cooling breezes and are tuned to the sun’s passage, perfectly diffusing natural light throughout each day. As in nature, right angles have no place here.

Light is not simply part of this space–it is the space. Light blooms and flows within atria, meeting rooms, research library, and IT center, emanating from triangular niches and from behind sculpted ceilings. Luminous bands integrated into handrails and underneath reception desks, successfully hidden from sight, provide intuitive wayfinding. In the Musalla, ambient lighting mimics the daylight colors. As night falls, the grounds continue to radiate. These faceted buildings grow and glow from the sand like sculpted crystals.

Nanjing Yuzui Runmao Tower

Website Copy, Office for Visual Interaction

As dusk settles on Nanjing, China, a profound homage to the city’s culture ripples high overhead. This is Runmao Tower: an upright simulacrum of the Yangtze River exciting over the wavelike textures found within Yuhua Stone. Runmao’s undulating glass facade, run through with minute, invisible shadow gaps, embraces both history and legend. As night falls, these gaps waken with LED light, purling and swelling like shimmering water over the precious, iconic stones. In the dark, to onlookers below and to the heavens above, the entire surface is fluid quicksilver. 

Each Yuhua Stone is a token of this region’s distant past; this majestic structure indelibly honors tradition as keenly as it celebrates the region’s future. When construction is completed, Runmao Tower will be an architectural phenomenon; paired with Office of Visual Interaction’s design, it will create an iconic nighttime identity that captures and proclaims the story of time.

MEIXI URBAN HELIX

Website Copy, Office for Visual Interaction

Above Lake Meixi in Changsha, China, rises the Urban Helix, uniting the two worlds of nature and man-made structure. It is a glowing, spiral public space with extraordinary 360-degree views of the water, the plaza below, and the surrounding city. The ramp flows seamlessly into a lower observation deck, tracing the shore’s perimeter, and continues over the plaza as a greenery-lined bridge.

During the day, sunlight floods the Helix, but with nightfall the lighting design illuminates the structure, sculpting its winding form into the darkness above a vast public space. The design creates one continuous ribbon of light across the Helix surfaces: an eye-catching presence whose reflection in the surrounding water creates an infinity effect.

Office for Visual Interaction

Website Copy, “About”

…In both breadth and scope, OVI’s portfolio is vast and inclusive, comprising intimate, humble installations and iconic, larger-than-life works–each approached with equal passion and humanity. Our designs and products discover and emphasize stories as dynamically composed visual soundtracks that underscore and invigorate architectural masterpieces. The stories that shape our work advance the industry while honoring and echoing the ideas of the past, memorializing and progressing the quintessence of a place, a people, an era.

Our job is to extract, refine, and strengthen the stories that make any location exceptional. Each is brought to life with bold thinking and hidden logic, a sophisticated aesthetic, and a celebration of humanity creating an iconic, emotional, and holistic expression of light.