Turning the building round

06-11-2014

Sometimes it takes a bit of lateral thought to come to a lighting solution.

Creative Lighting Design for a Creative School Environment

This project is the Reception Hall of Woodroffe School, an Arts and Crafts building in Dorset. Around twenty-fice years ago, a modern 'intervention' created valuable office space for the school but left the lighting of the interior architecture in a bit of a state. OK - its only taken a quarter of a century to get round to doing something about it, but that just means that the solution deserves to be that bit more special.

The question I asked myself - and anyone else within earshot - was this: where does the light need to go?

Conventional thinking would have had a line of fixtures mounted above the reception floor, thereby spoiling one of the few remaining views of the original building. But is that what's needed?

Woodroffe School is Visual Arts College and students' work is displayed around the Reception Hall - which begged the question; why light the floor when the walls speak more about the School. The floor gets lit as a matter of course, and we end up with a far more dramatic lighting installation.

A serendipitous piece of interventionist architecture presented us with a modern 'corbel' detail a

nd it was easy from there - a line of modern candles, created by employing cylindrical fluorescent luminaires (the R8 from ETAP Lighting) in the role of votive candles.

In effect, we turned the building around 90 degrees, lighting across the space from wall to wall. And, as far as I'm co