Kaoru Mende

Kaoru Mende is an architectural lighting designer from Japan and personally he is one of my favorite. He is a professor of lighting design at several institutions ad universities in Tokyo and he is the CEO of Lighting Planners Associates. He has won more than twenty five awards from both the Illuminating Engineering Societies of North America (IESNA) and the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD).

Kaoru Mende`s philosophy is that lighting must be interpreted into the space that the architect wants to express. It should be used to complement the environment and to bring out the space. To Kaoru lighting is all about expressing feelings. He always tries to emphasis the architecture with light, to make the architecture appear much more elegant at night because the lighting can transform it into something it never is in daylight.

One of the most important basics to Kaoru is that every important aspect, every important emotional scene is hidden in natural lighting (daylight or light from fire). What he teaches is to observe natural lighting and study it well because it is the structure of good lighting. The challenge is to apply what we learnt and the technology we have so it creates comfortable lighting for us humans.

 

Lighting Planners Associates website: http://www.lighting.co.jp/english/index.html

 

Some of Kaoru Mende`s work:

 

1) National Peace Memorial Hall, Nagasaki, Japan.

 

2) Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo, Japan.

 

3) Uchinada Ohashi Bridge, Ishikawa, Japan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) OASIS 21, Nagoya, Japan.

Yann Kersalé

Yann Kersalé is French conceptual artist who has worked with light for over 20 years. He is one of the best lighting artists in the France and his work added a lot to the school of modern French light art.

He is fascinated by the way things which appear so normal, so common-place during the day. Which can take on a different personality at night. And what interests him is that the night is an area of life that is different from the one to which we are accustomed.

He said that “You can see an object, a building every single day. But then at night it can suddenly become completely different.”

I completely agree with him because as i searched for interesting lighting i saw the huge difference between how they appear in day time and how they appear at night. Some buildings or monuments has even a type of lighting that changes depending on the weather or the time. These changes makes you wonder how a change in the intensity of the light or the color of the light can make such difference on the way it appears and the way humans may feel toward the same building.

Yann Kersalé web site in which you can see more of his fascinating work : http://www.ykersale.com/

 

Some of Yann Kersalé work :

 

1) Le theatre-temps, Opera, Lyon, France.

 

2) L’Ô, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France.

 

3) Un jardin sous la lune, Baccarat, Paris, France.