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.